No technology can see
As well as I, with my own two eyes
No amount of pictures
A thousand words or no
Can truly capture emotion
Which is the song of the heart
Some things can only be seen
True at the moment, not saved for later
They are things that are remembered
By the heart, not paper
Some things can only be felt
Raw and untainted
Overwhelming and human
With the sound of the crickets and bullfrogs
In my ears
The dark breeze in my hair
And the rosy twilight clouds
Starkly highlighting the tree’s
Barren winter branches
I can’t help but wonder.
Are all the new gadgets being made
Wild grasps at our retreating human-ness
With each passing day
We forget
And so we fear
We fear to forget
Because that means going back
And that is not an option
So we go forward
Too fast
And naturally perhaps,
We leave our minds in the dust of our passage
They say that we
Use only a small part of our brains
What happens if
Everyday
It gets smaller?
We fear
We fear as our minds slip by
And like a sieve
Trying to catch the only water
Spilling forth from the only well
In a desert of ignorance
Splash by splash it escapes
We grab with our sieves
To save what we can
We try to transfer the functions we lose
To technology
Bringing memories
Most of all
To new and wondrous storage
Yet we fail
For the simple, beautiful things in life
The sweet farewell kiss
The blush of the skies
The perfume of unfurling rose buds
The flavor of smooth chocolate
The reverberation of resonant harmonies
Cannot be captured
Truly
You can use words to evoke
Long buried memories
Or those vaulted and keyed
From people
That’s what poetry is
And why it must be written from the heart
Not the mind
But is impossible to capture
Be it sound, sight, feel, smell, or taste
Perhaps special words can
Be used to keep our minds
But hard drives cannot
Nor can pictures captured in a split second
Truly capture the moment
Impossible
Because they are boundless
They are wild sprites
Of the mind
A soaring hawk
Always out of reach
Never tamed, never captured.
They are felt
Not known
They are the things that matter
And they are beyond simplistic means
So, in our grabs at our minds
We lose them further
As silicon and copper wire take over
What the mind and heart used to do
Not only are they inadequate
They give further reason and ease
To forget the thoughts
We strained to keep
No help
Perhaps we should capture back
The lost ways
Instead of blundering down
The shale hill that led us here
And will lead us to worse
When any time
The shale will break
And tumble, slide, fall with a crash
We will reach the end of the line.