SO GLAD SHE DIDN’T LIVE TO SEE IT
What will it be, the thing they say
they’re glad to have me gone before,
something I wouldn’t understand
or would defeat me even more
after it was explained?
I don’t mean only the generic
tragedies built into events—
fatal rare illnesses or freak
statistically sound accidents
that might take people I once loved
in life, and I’d have died again
to be told of; I mean the unique
tools and toys of daily custom—
the bound foot, or the selfie stick—
accepted by each generation
in its own time and place as not
just perfectly normal but—for all
the thought we put into it—eternal;
and go on assuming that, despite
the accelerating rate at which
we invent, adopt, get bored, discard.
So glad she didn’t live to see it…
That’s what I say in thanks my friend
Amy never had to spend
a single hour on the internet,
she who had found the typewriter
gone electric too much to bear.
I used to shrug off fears like hers
as alarmist, the inevitable
firewalls of the old and feeble—
and maybe they were. Still, the past
she lived is a thing I recognize.
Will whoever is around to mourn
my grandchildren be known at least
as human, of other humans born,
no avatar or algorithm
of buying trends or phantom-limb
expressions of feeling? Not a robot
self-taught to simulate regret?
I wonder if somehow they’ll mean it,
having cannibalized the countless
metadata that incorporated
you and me, when they say of us
Poor things, they thought they were far-sighted!
It’s good they went when they did.
