Poem: Trifecta

Trifecta

Why is the world so obsessed
with things that come in threes?
Primary colors, types of rock formation,
embryonic germ layers,
all triplets of convenience.
How many ships did Columbus sail?
How many ingredients in a BLT?
How many heads on Hagrid’s dog?
Even this poem seems parsed in threes.
When the French cry Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,
is one just a tool, adopted to keep the others company?
Was one of Macbeth’s witches a lonely sister
who had nothing better to do?

Even in medicine, triads have found a way
to persist through obscurity.
I imagine the condemned Hans Reiter
in a campaign to stay his name
deciding on arthritis, conjunctivitis, urethritis.
Who knows how long it took to decide on that third symptom
or which fourth to cut.
Tell me, can anyone really name the pentad of TTP?
But we remember the musketeers
of normal pressure hydrocephalus.

Three commands dogma, makes juries turn heads.
Just the other day, next to a poster about
the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
I saw a flyer from the biology club
illustrating a trifecta of nucleotides
encoding the amino acid serine.