Three Thousand Years before Apple and Three Thousand Years after the iPad
I carry in my knapsack poems by
The ancient Greeks, the eldest ones, the best,
The best of elders. They are still as spry
As dolphins’ arcs beside Argosy’s quest.
Lines wait within the safety of the book,
Alive and lively now as ever, like
A resurrection plant. They undertook
Divinity when quilling down each spike
Of brilliance in their lines. But crammed in with
That poetry I carry modern things,
Phone chargers and an iPad. There’s no myth
To go with them. They don’t have singing wings.
_No: iPads, gone millennia from now,
__Will be nothing. They aren’t The Golden Bough.
Phillip Whidden is a poet published in America, England, Scotland (and elsewhere) in book form, online, and in journals. He has also had an article on Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum est” published in The New Edinburgh Review.
Indeed, iPads and the like will come and go. Poems by the ancient Greeks have long since passed the test of time. You have expressed this truth very well.