Here is what she has to say about her poem: Massey offers a fresh and vital voice concerning family, spirituality and womanhood to our ongoing dialogue.
FLASHLIGHT DARK SHEEP EYES SERIES
I’m continuing the series with Chantel Massey’s poem “Black Sheep (mule of the world)” from her collection, Bursting at the Seams. I hope these poems will begin or continue important conversations we need to be having. As State Poet Laureate, during the month of July, I’ll be posting poems by Indiana writers addressing many of the issues that have come to light in the last four months. If COVID-19 opened the door to a national awareness of long entrenched and unacknowledged social and racial indignities and injustices, the murder of George Floyd blew that door off its hinges. This is not a time to be silent, especially for writers. The list of other species without a tapetum lucidum includes pigs, birds, reptiles and most rodents and primates – including humans.Poetry in Our Times: Protest and Pandemic So don’t be alarmed if your dog’s or cat’s eyes don’t glow. Most animals with blue eyes and white or light-colored coats have also lost this trait. Like cats, the lemur, a small primate, and its close relative, the bush baby – also known as a “ night monkey” – also have a superreflective tapetum made with riboflavin.Įven though a lot of animals have eyeshine, some small domesticated dogs lack this trait. But in aquatic animals the tapetum takes up most of the eye, because they need to see all around them in the dark.
In land animals, the tapetum is found in the top half of the eye behind the retina, because they need to see what is on the ground best. The tapetum lucidum is also useful to fish, dolphins and other aquatic animals, because it helps them see better in murky, dark water. That includes predators and prey alike, everything from wild foxes to farmed sheep and goats. Many other animals that need to see at night have a tapetum lucidum. Tommy Greco, CC BY-SA Other animals’ eyes glow too Most dogs’ eyes will glow in dark spaces when a light shines on them.
Variation in tapetum color is not unique to cats and can be found in lots of species. In cats, the tapetum most often glows yellow-green or yellow-orange, but the color varies, just like their irises – the colorful part of their eye, which can be green, yellow, blue or golden. Riboflavin has unique properties that amplify light to a specific wavelength that cats can see well, which greatly increases the sensitivity of the retina to low light.
The feline tapetum lucidum is special because its reflective compound is riboflavin, a type of vitamin B. This gives the retina a second chance to absorb more light. It’s located in the back of the eye behind the retina – a thin layer of tissue that receives light, converts the light to an electrical signal and sends this signal to the brain to interpret the image.Ī cat’s tapetum lucidum is made up of cells with crystals that, like a mirror, reflect light back to the retina. In addition to having large pupils and lots of rods, cats have something people don’t: a tapetum lucidum, a Latin medical term that translates to “ bright or shining tapestry.” The tapetum lucidum is also known as “ eyeshine.” The Open University, CC BY-SA The tapetum lucidum Humans do not have a tapetum lucidum but cats, including lynxes and pumas, do.
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