less than half the story

I’ve been thinking about seeds a lot as I keep planting peas that get eaten by mice, and I’ve written a few poems about them. But pruning one into 44 words for Monday’s dVerse quadrille prompt “planting seeds” didn’t work for me. So I tried to think of what a seed is – enough genetic information for an organism (diploid), the machinery of a cell to start it all going (mitochondria, etc)… Did you know that mitochondrial DNA comes purely down the female line? Yours is the same as your mother’s, your grandmother’s, your great-grandmother’s, stretching back along a line of a hundred thousand women…

What arrogance,
what masculine conceit,
calling your semen ‘seed’!
Go on, spill it on the ground,
wait for an army of sons to rise,
from those sad wrigglers –
haploid,
halfwit,
huh! they’re not even half the story.
You’ll wait forever –
it’s not seed you sprayed,
just pollen.