Forest Fires, Umatilla National Forest, Washington State (2006)
Susannah Sayler,
The Canary Project
“A Confession of Lies”
Elizabeth Macklin, A Woman Kneeling in the Big City (1992)
No, it isn’t needed: this blue sky, the two exact trees
Where they are—green ash, blue pine. The seas can rise
To within an inch of the buildings but will not,
Ever. For now, like them, my words can be trusted.
There is no need for a doubt. We will not die.
We cannot keep the woods from receding north
To a cooler horizon. Red, white, and yellow
Trash will escape our hands to go into the water.
A glowing, new coal will escape our lips and go down
Through time in the water, to come up a cool, gold
Drink. The truth: We aren’t eager to die. We
Turn all our acts to good. We think and desire
Alike. Whatever we start we complete. We don’t
Let our anger loose. All earth
Is as wide and dear and clean as when I was small.
Whenever I lie, I tell a truth.
Elizabeth Macklin has a new poem in the June 4 New Yorker.
More poems from A Woman Kneeling in the Big City
June 15th, 2007
From the Bizarre Vintage Americana Time Capsule: “City of the Bees,” a 1951 bee filmstrip from the “Moody Institute of Science.”
I happened across this film while researching an upcoming post. Until twenty minutes in, I suspected the MIS was another name for the Dharma Initiative. I started looking surreptitiously for Marvin Candle. But everything changed around 22:00, when retro-charming, grainy footage of dancing bees was suddenly displaced by the Ten Commandments! Hey. . . this isn’t really about science, is it?
Imagine the clatter of the classroom tape projector. Be surprised by the gratuitous riot scenes, no doubt caused by reefer-mad materialist mobs, at 24:00. Be horrified by the “warped and twisted” (!) practices of unspecified native tribes. The Bible finally appears at 26:00, and the rest of this confused film is a sermon.
I wonder: were these films widely shown in public schools? The biology is the thinnest possible veneer for overt religious instruction, and I hope public schools would have objected, even in 1951. But for all I know, they’re still shown in science classes today.
(Turns out the Moody Institute of Science wasn’t the forebear of the Dharma Initiative after all, but another DI - which is all about ID.)
Want more faux-biology? Here’s some carnivorous plants! With rockets, and . . . oh, whatever.
June 15th, 2007