And now for our (optional!) prompt. Poetry is an ancient art, and one that revisits themes that existed thousands of years ago – love, nature, jealousy. But that doesn’t mean that poets live in a sort of pre-history unaffected by technological advances. Emily Dickinson wrote about trains, and I’m rather charmed by this 1981 poem about the “incredible hair” of actors on television. In a more recent example, Becca Klaver’s “Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie” draws inspiration from the contemporary drive to document everything in digital photographs. Today, we challenge you to write a poem that similarly bridges (whether smoothly or not) the seeming divide between poetry and technological advances.
Happy writing!
An Ode to Unopened E-mails
Why do I
keep thee?
Two Thousand
and Two Hundred Fifty
unopened
emails -
unread,
saved, some even spam.
I tend to
thee like a temple dancer
tends to her
tired feet.
She doesn’t stop.
How can she
when her
ankle bells continue
to chime with probabilities?
Born in the gap
between the end
of my fingertips
and the
clack of laptop keys
lies a pond -
a pond of possibilities
Comfy in my shore-
this Ikea chair
with lumbar support,
I watch
the ripples die
and birth
beneath days, heavy
and empty
of acceptance
while grace hovers
like a fidgety dragonfly
flit-flit-flitting fleetingly
on the surface of an un-min(e)d pond -
the pond of possibilities
possibilities
are deep
deep like a maybe
maybe flirts with memories
memories are
pages
pages turn
turn to
death
death is wise
wise like a
witch
witches
pick plants, crack eggs
eggs make
cakes
cakes taste
nice
nice like an
unopened mail
mail with a
subject line
a line that says:
Congratulations!
Or
You’ve won!
Or
Hot at Fifty!
Or
Or
Or
Like I said,
unopened mail
is a pond
A
Pond
Of
Possibilities...
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