An Ame­ri­can poet, Archi­bald Ran­dolph Ammons, has writ­ten this poem, enti­tled “Reflec­ti­ve”:

Poems are not easy to trans­la­te. But the effort to do so is wor­th­whi­le – poems cap­tu­re essen­ces just as mathe­ma­ti­cal equ­ations or che­mi­cal struc­tu­res do. And this poem tells us some­thing wise abo­ut what we, as human beings, sho­uld aspi­re to.

The poet finds a weed, a low­ly, sim­ple plant. A weed is first of all a survi­vor, it must have a suc­cess­ful adap­ti­ve mecha­nism. A weed is not weak. It is cle­ar that the poet has looked care­ful­ly at the weed, tho­ught abo­ut it.

This is what scien­ce does, my friends.

The world is full of ordi­na­ry things – weeds – that bear care­ful exa­mi­na­tion. And reward tho­se who look care­ful­ly, look in, look abo­ut. And not just look with our eyes, but stu­dy the weed with all our sen­ses, with our tools too.

Dri­ven by our curio­si­ty, we look at the weed. We reason out its remar­ka­ble bio­che­mi­stries, we see how it survi­ves our own efforts (her­bi­ci­des) to kill it. As we learn more abo­ut the bio­lo­gy, che­mi­stry, phy­sics and eco­lo­gy of the weed, we are fil­led with wonder.

And with fur­ther questions. It all comes from sim­ple curio­si­ty and the per­se­ve­ran­ce to look at what others would pass by with a glance.

But the poet goes fur­ther. He says the weed has “a mir­ror in it, and that mir­ror looked in at a mir­ror in me…” Is he just play­ing games? Yes, word games, games of infi­ni­te mir­rors. But A.R. Ammons is also poin­ting at some­thing else, some­thing deep.

By looking care­ful­ly at the bio­che­mi­stry and bio­lo­gy of the weed we also learn much abo­ut ourselves.

We sha­re many enzy­mes, many genes with that weed. Yes, the weed respi­res in a dif­fe­rent way. But many of its che­mi­cal pro­ces­ses are in our cells. Once we were one, that weed and we. We diver­ged, but not as far as we, pro­ud humans think.

This is the won­der­ful, hum­bling les­son of mole­cu­lar bio­lo­gy. A.R. Ammons makes us think abo­ut that rela­tion­ship. And that we and the weed are tied in one cyc­le – not of just thin­king of the weed as a harm­ful plant to be era­di­ca­ted, but as part of a won­der­ful hall of mir­rors in which we and the weed coexist in one world.

And the poet makes us think too of the ten­ta­ti­ve natu­re of our under­stan­ding of the natu­re of the weed, and of our­se­lves. We are smart, but our intel­li­gen­ce is not as fool­pro­of as we think.

We under­stand the weed, but that under­stan­ding is pro­vi­sio­nal, sha­ped by the mir­rors within us, always capa­ble of being improved.

By you.