Ubiquity of microorganisms
We are vast and small but we cover it all
On stones, on walls, and even your skin we crawl,
Various places some thrive,
While the rest decline,
Now watch as our presence stand tall.
Antibiotics
A force of reckoning lies behind these walls.
The machinery of life we’ll break and stall.
Their growth, we’ll turn,
These microbes will learn,
Our presence will cause their tumble and fall.
Resistance
Chemical warfare we did not foresee.
Our colony’s at risk and cannot flee.
But a solution I laid,
Structures subtly remade,
These invaders will not harm me
Endospores
We lived normal lives but now we stop.
This world is turning as our resources flop.
Next generations will reap,
Little spores in their sleep,
Awaken when your food is tip-top.
Exponential Growth
We began small with cells amounting to few,
But save for next as our population flew.
Until the death toll rose,
Passing and births stay close,
Then things go down and the rest die too.
Artists statement:
These are 5 poems covering various topics covered in class for microbiology. Ubiquity of Microorganisms attempts to convey the idea that microbes are everywhere but the presence of specific microbes will depend on the type of environment being looked at. Antiobiotics is a poem in the perspective of antibiotics invading a bacterial cell. In order to kill off the microbes, these antibiotics are impairing their ability to replicate and survive by interfering with the internal cell processes such as their metabolism, transcription, translation, replication, etc. Resistance is a sort of response to Antibiotics. Whatever the invaders have planned for the cell is now unfeasible because the bacteria has resistance. The phrase “structures subtly remade” comes from the idea of protein mutations preventing any of the antibiotics from attaching to important proteins and enzymes. In this imaging of it, it could be a plan for sabotage by the antibiotics where they planned to loosen all the screws or bolts off of something but only thought to bring one type/size of screwdriver. If the bacteria happens to have the size of screws used in their structures be of the wrong size, the antibiotics really cant do much. Endospores turns the bacteria into individuals leaving the next generation of baby/unrealized bacteria into stasis until a good environment is found. Exponential growth attempts to put each phase of bacterial growth into a line. These phases include lag phase, log/exponential phase, stationary phase, and the death phase. I hope you guys enjoy my attempts at poetry!