Octopussy!

So, I signed up for a poetry session online - donation based - and I didn't know what to expect. But SeaWyld was great! A lovely woman called Lizzie Elliott ran it - she's a marine biologist with a wonderful energy. She runs these nature based poetry sessions every month and also does online meditation. She was fabulous.

It was a small group of charming and talented people. Lizzie first told us about octopuses - and it's octopuses NOT octopi because the word has a Greek not a Latin root! - and then did a brief grounding before giving us an individual prompt and twenty minutes to write a poem.

Here's mine:

My blue-blooded friend, whom I

have never met -

you set me thinking.

In those autonomous arms... free will?

Consciousness?

A separate identity?

('My pronouns are...')

Your glorious multi-furcated mind

enthralls me.

Is my stomach -

where, they tell me, there are

as many neurons as in the brain of a cat -

making independent decisions?

Or my heart?

(It may take, I think, a lifetime

to know in my head what my heart

has so long been hiding.)

But you, my blue-blooded friend,

with your camouflage

and your shape-shifting super powers,

your playful, puzzle-solving intellect

and your many millennia of success,

we have let you down.

Do we need nine brains

to be wise enough

or three hearts to care enough

not to be what we are?