Awakened Memory

By Mary E. Adair

In the niche of my mind

An embryo of memory I find,

Indigenous to my high school days,

Where it did hibernate in the maze

Of the brain of this said omnivore

A story I've not told before.

A prof we all considered a rogue

Who went for the jugular of one in a fog,

Assigned the class a list of terms

We should have buried in the nearest berms.

With amoeboid, and kinesthetic

Neither word sympathetic,

On to dehiscent and sessile

Surely not heard in awhile;

And the mimicry abounded as each alone

Tried to memorize and spell pheromone.

Vestigials of graft appeared in our midst,

As those less 'cerebral' begged for the list

Of definitions for fission, labial, even tuber,

And the bud of intelligence, like that of Shubert,

Blossomed that year in Biology II,

But it's not a course I would like to redo.