Jitters
I’m up to the minute
in news-flash alarms—
PCBs in the water, mercury in fish,
bird flu pandemic, various gases,
and summer will bring its own bad news
of West Nile virus, chronic wasting disease,
tornadoes—the odds
of surviving life are small,
whatever you do.
And I’ve also read, tucked away
in the Times‘ Circuits section,
that we’ve made giant microwave
E-bombs at high-powered frequencies
that can fry our computers
from miles away and crash
the lifetime’s work
that was our only hope
for immortality.
Let’s conspire
to etch our words, our stories
on stone, hidden in caves,
memorized in the nursery rhymes
recited to children
on the way to sleep,
another piece of human heritage
like love, like hope,
like DNA,
fallible, distributed
in weedy holographic duplicates
so dense they can’t be blown away.
Robin Chapman (website) won the Cider Press Review Editors’ Award for her newest collection of poems, Abundance. Her Verse Daily page contains Amazon links to five of her ten poetry collections. Her poems have appeared recently in 5 AM, Poetry East, and Southern Poetry Review and online at Project Gutenberg, Umbrella, and Babel Fruit. She hosts poems on Robin Chapman’s Poetry a Day Blog.
Let us conspire, indeed. Lovely.