Selection Against the Wraith Mutation

It cropped up in one body,
One conception, and it hopped,
Somehow, into a second,

And then it met with something
Gene sequencers sometimes term
Ultraselection pressure

Against it carrying on,
And in two generations
It was gone. What has it left?

Well, its fellow travelers,
Many ordinary genes
In ordinary flavors

Carried on and on into
A third generation, now
Free of that mutant allele,

Well and good—no guarantee,
Of course, they’ll keep on moving.
Also, two embodied lives—

One complete, one mostly done—
In those two generations,
Lived the way they were lived, thanks

In no small part to that base
With the copying error,
Plus all the lives those lives touched,

All those ripples in the waves.
But the deleterious
Pattern itself? It’s going

With its second and final
Body, and it won’t be back,
One wraith like a soul like that.