by Maurice O’Sullivan

     If three is prime but thirty not,
why are those early years forgot?
Why think the prime of life that time
when everything appears sublime:
prime cuts of steak, prime rates from banks;
our bodies primed, no need for Spanx?
    But are those really our best years
because we learned to mask our tears?
Perhaps we peak far earlier
before our lives become a blur,
back when we live in the present tense
and everything makes far more sense.
     Since Amazon first seized the term
and started making retail squirm,
we’ve lost a reverence for primes,
a word that once sustained life’s rhymes.   
     Back then Star Trek’s key Prime Directive
could teach us all no one’s defective:
observe and understand each race,
treat all with dignity and grace;
evolved or clearly primitive,
all have an equal right to live.
     Remember Darwin showed primates
are much like us, in fact cognates
(though primus inter pares means
we think we got the better genes).
    While most no longer prime a pump—
and few have ever seen a sump—
it’s still part of our golden rule
that kids attend a primary school
to prime them for what is to come
(and shield them from behaving dumb).
    Like slithy toves their gyres and gimbles,
most scholars love eccentric symbols.
Astronomers use primes to split
the universe by arcminute;
grammarians and topographers
decided then that prime refers
to their worlds too, a neat conceit
to mark apostrophes and feet.
     Religious orders find it odd
that all those folks who question God
would choose this ancient term for prayers
to brand mere secular affairs.
In cloistered halls, at break of day,
their Prime’s a perfect time to pray,
a chance to bless the universe
between night’s Lauds and morning’s Terce.

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After brief careers as a teamster, bartender, and jail guard, Maurice O’Sullivan was able to combine those skills as the Kenneth Curry Professor of Literature (now Emeritus) at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. An award-winning teacher, writer, and filmmaker, he has published a dozen books and scores of articles, essays, and columns.