Summer for thee, grant I may be
When Summer days are flown!
Thy music still, when Whipporwill
And Oriole — are done!
For thee to bloom, I’ll skip the tomb
And row my blossoms o’er!
Pray gather me —
Anemone —
Thy flower — forevermore!
—Emily Dickinson
— Time, is a concept known only to one of God’s creatures: Man.
— Just for today, be a sunflower!
— Give me that!
Décimo quinto episódio da segunda temporada de Frasier.
Because in our world
something is always hidden,
small and white,
small and what you call
pure, we do not grieve
as you grieve, dear
suffering master; you
are no more lost
than we are, under
the hawthorn tree, the hawthorn holding
balanced trays of pearls: what
has brought you among us
who would teach you, though
you kneel and weep,
clasping your great hands,
in all your greatness knowing
nothing of the soul’s nature,
which is never to die: poor sad god,
either you never have one
or you never lose one.
—Louise Glück, The Wild Iris (obrigado C.)
Agora algo completamente diferente: O gato Bob, o último a aparecer por aqui. É simpático, já foi esterilizado, mas está doente (na fotografia vê-se mal, mas tem sangue no nariz). Está a tomar antibiótico para recuperar e estragar bastante junto com os outros 1.000.
A imagem é da revista Life.
A weird garden of mutated plants at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island offers a foretaste of what an Earth devastated by atomic energy may look like. The ten-acre tract, closely guarded, is in its tenth year of use. It features a long cylinder of radioactive Cobalt-60 that is lowered into the ground for several hours each day, showering the nearby plants with 2000-curie gamma rays that induce the genetic changes known as mutations.
Several useful plant mutations have resulted, though most of the garden’s plants are biological monstrosities. Among the useful mutants are a bushy type of navy bean that is resistant to disease and easier to harvest; a strain of oat resistant to the costly rust disease; and a hardy, short stemmed rice plant. A strain of peach trees that ripens two weeks earlier than normal, and one that ripens two weeks later than normal, have also been produced.
But most of the crop is strange and bizarre. In a wedge-shaped bed of gladioluses, those nearest the gamma-source (which would kill a human being four feet away within an hour) are dwarfed to one-eighth normal size. Tobacco plants grow with cord-like, stringy leaves in the Brookhaven garden. Some other plants bear little resemblance to their non-mutated originals.
The purpose of the Atomic Energy Commission-sponsored garden is to develop beneficial mutants for the improvement of agriculture. More than 150 plant breeders and geneticists are taking part in the radiation experiments.
—Steven Rory, Super-Science Fiction, Junho 1959 (Internet Archive)
Também existe um sítio, Atomic Gardening, dedicado a este assunto.