Genetics
Sinead Morrisey
, About
• This poem explores the poet’s relationship with her parents and their
relationship with each other. Clever interplay of words suggest the
complex genetic inheritance that goes into making a child. Physical
characteristics are passed on, but never a carbon copy of what went
before. Yet, one’s entire being emerges out of the previous generation
• The parents seem no longer to be together. But they remain present in
the genetic inheritance manifested in the narrator’s body. Like the
Christian marriage ceremony that speaks of a couple becoming ‘one
flesh’, the narrator’s hands do the same, a physical manifestation of
married love
• At the end a new relationship is introduced, in the pronoun ‘you’. The nex
generation, the future, is represented in the form of a ‘bequest’ from the
past, a new genetic mix.
Sinead Morrisey
, About
• This poem explores the poet’s relationship with her parents and their
relationship with each other. Clever interplay of words suggest the
complex genetic inheritance that goes into making a child. Physical
characteristics are passed on, but never a carbon copy of what went
before. Yet, one’s entire being emerges out of the previous generation
• The parents seem no longer to be together. But they remain present in
the genetic inheritance manifested in the narrator’s body. Like the
Christian marriage ceremony that speaks of a couple becoming ‘one
flesh’, the narrator’s hands do the same, a physical manifestation of
married love
• At the end a new relationship is introduced, in the pronoun ‘you’. The nex
generation, the future, is represented in the form of a ‘bequest’ from the
past, a new genetic mix.
