Science News: A Wild Bird Leads People to Honey
African hive, hot with bees. A man with a stick calls through his teeth; a bird comes, the Honeyguide. It finds a hive, up where a man can’t see, and the man lights his stick to shove smoke into air. Tree, axed. Hive, smashed—spilling its frenzy. This is where the sweetness starts. Pond of syrup, meaty wax. Open for a bird who learned to be called, a man trained by the bird to share.
Science News: Amphibians Glow. Humans Just Couldn’t See It—Until Now.
Someone thought to shine a blue light, and discovered brilliance on a tiger salamander’s back. Gobs of green. Marbled salamander, Cranwell’s horned frog, newt with neon stripes. Their beauty limited by the human eye. Possibly such flare serves to unnerve their predators. Poor newts. They don’t know how much we cannot see, and yet we stomp everywhere.
Science News: As Animals and Plants Go Extinct, Languages Die Off Too
Inside languages: a lung and its lunge for breath, the way the mind can gun the tongue. I wonder how the fox, how the dog, how the doe, complete their thoughts. How god speaks with angels, or eagles with their gods. Inside: a gauge, an age. Lens: How the mind sees. Angle: How the tongue twists. The way some sang, and their last worlds were sung
Science News: Snakes Had Back Legs for 70 Million Years, Fossil Record Says
Let the record show we all were other, once. In the bone, a nag, a lag, an ache. A phantom-feel. Does the snake, belly scrawling dust, itch to sit up on its haunches? Does it swim through grass, back lit by stars, and sense it once kept an eye on the moon? Ages, then a vantage lost. Let the record show we know: some prospect is no longer within reach.
Science News: Gene Tweak Can Extend Life 500% (But You Have to Be a Worm)
If you can learn to love the fist of darkness, let it close around you. No human touch, dancing in the rain, light at the end of the tunnel. A simplicity of soil, foamy loam. Strip down to the basic muscle of survival and let earth with all it brings pass through you. Life extends its linear line. Now, how long is long enough?
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing and A Different Wakeful Animal, which received the David Martinson—Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. An award-winning science writer and former contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine before earning an MFA from Pacific University, her poems have appeared in the American Journal of Poetry, Atlanta Review 25th Anniversary Anthology, PANK, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, The Southern Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley, California.
Header photo by Brums, courtesy Pixabay.
