Dead Letters: A Poem

I haven't written poetry in a long time. My spirit was broken by the (non)-reaction to my poetry on Facebook, over years. I'll probably get back to it eventually.

I've just raided my archives looking for a poem. Most of them are poor, in my view. Here's one I wrote in Dublin Airport (of all places) some time early in the millennium. It's not bad, I think.

My entire life, I've had an obsession with memory and oblivion. Is it healthy? I don't know. It makes a poem, anyway.

A sure-nuff archivist has told me that wearing latex gloves is not encouraged in archives as it reduces dexterity. I'd heard that already, although I can't remember if it was before I'd written this poem, or afterward.

Dead Letters

Folded and read and folded so often now–
The fingers that folded it first, the eyes that read
Stopped work last century. In latex gloves
The doctorate student folds it, wonders how
Her days will be replayed when she is dead.
Those hour-long evening phone calls that she loves
Will leave no trace. What will her photos say?
She smiled at weddings, liked to dress in green.
She’s poured her soul through a keyboard now for years
But none of that was ever stored away
In a cardboard box. Her life unrolls on screen;
Each day gets written, sent, and disappears.

What then? The video her sister made
One Halloween? A camera never caught
One motion of the soul. What’s to be seen
In a winter’s evening endlessly replayed?
No trace or what she loved or what she thought–
Life’s glories gone as if they’d never been.

She thought of all that’s tapped out, signalled, said;
An endless thirst for words endlessly fed;
And all will die before these words of the dead.