we were both lying on our backs one night,  

gazing at the sparkling sky,

my son, I say, these stars so bright,

look just like antibodies to my eye.

an unbelievably diverse array,

a myriad of specks so pale,

all unique in their own way,

galaxies at a nanoscopic scale.

the size of this prodigious repertoire,

is so vast it remains controversial,

it exceeds our imagination by far,

-        although  it’s only virtual.

there’s a supermassive black hole,

a place called the bone marrow,

where clonal deletion gains control,

to make their numbers narrow.

some are much too reactive,

they bind self too profusely,

it would certainly be maladaptive,

to let them cause auto-immunity

dad, why not better control their creation?

oh dear, that’s an obscure experimentation,

involving imprecision, VDJ recombination,

non-templated addition and random association,

all this followed by celestial migration,

to the dark zone for somatic hypermutation,

and repeated orbiting for T-helper selection,

astronomical cycles of affinity maturation.

let’s not even mention cytosine deamination,

which would create a whole other constellation,

antibodies maybe need some optimisation

but are already a little miracle of evolution