Ecstatic Scribe

Curator of lost words.

“What Freedom!”. Painting By Ilya Repin (Public Domain)

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Greetings, 21st-century scribe!
You say you write for humankind?
So, be careful what you compile,
lest your words of fiction
be taken for real life!
For I'm aware it’s not what 'is' that captures you,
but it's all that 'is not',
which you record in your fantasies,
that could be realised as history
by future minds starved of magic and mystery. 

For truth has a way of hiding, 
under collapsed scaffolding and dried-up dams,
within informational bits encoded in silicon chips, 
eventually crushed into sand.
All you touch may well be submerged 
by Mother Nature’s billowing skirts,
seducing an archaeologist's greyscale palette 
into a reimagination of yesteryear. 
 
But do not fret in vain either, 
for your words are impressed in an ether
whose function could well be lost forever
when your kind exists no longer.
Even paper melts in the hands of time
And though you may etch your sorrows in stone,
their meaning will fade into scratches and scrawls. 

You’re doomed, purveyor of words, no matter what you do. 
So what does it matter what flows through you?
For some day, perhaps your lost babble will recycle 
through the rumblings of a lonely soul 
whose stream of jumbled consciousness mirrors your very own.

And what you whisper in echoes, 
she will waste away her years recording 
in volumes of glorious ecstasy, 
mistaking the spin of an endless mystery 
for the will of her pen-prick force.