Ode to the Robobee
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Oh little bee, little robot bee, divingand swimming and putting the realthing to shame. You're sexless and hard,
you've no allegiance to a queen.The bee-loud glade is buzzing like a drone–We're done with the sweetness of hungry.
What can make can also take away: yourtiny wings weld you into a weapon, carryyou into the unknown. You've never known
a flower. Back in the lab, you've got a bodydouble: they're making you each by hand.The roboticist labors and dreams you
into the flight of the real thing. Listen–hear the tiny wings spin, building the buzz.
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Our curiosity has always built the buzz.For centuries, it wasa novelty to wind up what moved:once inventors usedthe clockwork,each creature's startle and jerkback a kind of dance between what wasand what can be, how everyone doestheir best to make nature not justbetter, butless of itself when repeated, a link.And oh, how we've always loved [End Page 174] the miniature, the innocent shrinkof everything. Our harmlessness, proved.
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Over time, our harmlessness provedthat we knew little, and when we pausedto learn more, we shuffled and shovedour way through the labs, gassedthe creatures we could no longer use.Now a small tool can undo a singlebee and make it new. We comminglelife and death, making robots in the imageof the bee, which dies in part to causeyou pain. Our job was to make lessthan the human eye could discern, the lawsof identification rely on someone's bestguess: "Oh–a honey bee?" A minor sting.
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A minor sting–like love: Oh honey
be mine–everyone lovesa movie's war romance.
There was a field of flowersand suddenly something
zooming around us–it was as big as a space ship,
a giant creature with metal wings.I imagined you were the pilot
and we'd set sail on that greatmachine. You'd learn to fly
and I'd build the engines.But now we'll have to go to war. [End Page 175]
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Now we'll have to go to war.There's always a president settingprecedents. This reflectsthe psychology of hornets,how when you stir the nest–No. The truth is that bees themselvesare more social than humans,except humans exhibitlike bees in war, how the youngmen want to go back to whenthey were part of something,a colony full of adrenaline, why elsevolunteer for another tour?That desire to return to the hive.
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That desire to return to the hive,where the queen lays over a thousandeggs a day, is strong. Keeps bees alive.
Like in life, robobees can't reproduce.We'll build another machine for that,so humanoid roboticists may produce
bees in a giant line of arms.For a robobee has no ovary to besuppressed. Needs no queen's charm,
no birth control. This bee is laborless.When a politician says birth control is badfor labor, he is only talking about us.
He wants us to be the drone, the workerand the Queen. No one will respect her.
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And a Queen? No one will respect her.We tried that.[ ] [End Page 176]
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We have always tried to replicatebodies with human invention: milkflowing from Cleopatra's mechanicalbreasts in processions, Jesusbleeding wood red drops that popin and out. His tears, displacedwater from live fish swimming insideof him. Vaucanson's duck defecatingfor the captivated crowd.So what if it's just a trick?It doesn't take a virgin birthto give us the feel of a miracle.Looking at ourselves, handmade,we feel delight, again and again.
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The delight of the new, again.Look at the child playing with drones!Look at the package delivered by drones!Soon the drone will be able to land.
and unlock your door:Package in the foyer!The news can see anything–they've sent in the drones!
The weather! Building safety? Mapping?Bring in the drones! Crops? BorderControl? Catch the criminal! AllYou need is this flying and zapping:
You can find it on the toy shelf–it's called the Flying Mini-Robot.
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Exhibit A: The Flying Mini-Robot.This robot has eyes. While the automatonwas once for being looked at, a noveltyto see life mirrored, this one sees. [End Page 177]
Look out those camera eyes by staringat your screen from the comfortof your own home. We, too, can goto Iraq, Russia, North Korea, inside
any school. We too can follow the bombas if we were the sniffing dogs.Watching everything unfold againand again. The mini-robot
flies where we don't dare go.The mini-robot can navigate anything.
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The mini-robot can navigate anything.My doctor hands me the booklet–my uterusis removable by a robotic arm.It enters the body rather than imitating it.
No more viewing the digesting duck–We are the duck, we're inside the duck, the duckis inside of us. It's a mechanized miracle–a wonderous little parlor trick.
The mini-robot can remove anything.Unwanted waste, bombs, the growththat has been wrapping itself aroundmy uterus. Of course, the uterus
must come out, too. It is vitalthat all robotic missions leave no trace.
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Leave no trace.Break a paper clip in half–thisis the size of the robobee. Next raceis to flight, sense, response
and "the Colony," which is basedon synchronizing bees so they can [End Page 178] move like a swarm, a corps,a fleet. Check: wingspan
3 cm. Wingbeat frequency:120 HZ, a speed so fastthat the wings are hard to seein flurry and flight. A wingless bee
to our naked eyes. In live colonies,bees communicate through a dance.
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Through a dance,the path to honey.The only wayto feed the queen.But what does this meanfor a metal fleet,whose regal homeis deep in the lab.Something so smallcan travel farto take a life.But cannot make it.I am as sterileas a robobee.
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Soon, we'll be reincarnated like a robobee.Sentience shrunk into a chip packedwith human memories. We'll seeeverything about us that's been tracked,
our digital and photographed past.Breaking news: a frog's heart and skincells bear the 'xenobot,' programmable at last.Like the robobee, it knows no pain, no sin.
I long to be its maker, to be the creatorlike everyone around me makes [End Page 179] life through lust or labor, a fate we'retold is natural. There are no fakes:
a bullet-sized wonder, a metaphor for striving,oh little bee, little robot bee, diving. [End Page 180]
Rebecca Morgan Frank's fourth collection of poems, Oh You Robot Saints!, is forthcoming in 2021. She is the author of Sometimes We're All Living in a Foreign Country, The Spokes of Venus, and Little Murders Everywhere, finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series, and The Kenyon Review. She is co-founder and editor of the online magazine Memorious.org.
