The final week of our first themed edition, Your Tech Life, continues today with poetry. 

by Shannon Lise

now we each got our own mini-screen to
make our fingers feel smarter 24/7 but I

still like to watch the old clocks go hunting,
tracking the hours down and pinning them

in place against that moon-sliced disc
brick-framed against the sky, like rare

insects catalogued by some soulless 19th
century entomologist spending hundreds

of hours squinting at the spiracles on a
golden stag beetle’s belly and trading the

magic of his own eyes for a hundred sets
of fine sketches in a handbound notebook

because nobody had invented cameras
yet which is a real shame if you think of all

the ophthalmologist’s bills that could have
been saved, only there’s no point in either

of us pretending we know if ophthalmology
was even a thing in the 1800s and I know

you’re about to open that iPhone X (with its
atomic clock sync that never runs late and

has evolved past hunting bugs) to whisper
Hey Siri, when was ophthalmology invented?

and she’ll say something like “Hermann von
Helmholtz invented the ophthalmoscope in 1851”

– see, I beat you to it – but I kind of wish you’d
ask instead about what we’ve traded our own

magic eyes for, and whether it was worth it,
or will be when we’re dead.

 

Image: Shoaib SR via Unsplash