QZERTY

Ettore won't thrust his own pen into odes,
Or laments, or pastoral compositions;
He's reported as saying that poems are beneath him,
An affront to his techno-macho pride.
We agree, he is better off tooling around,
Doing whatever he does in there,
In the plant that assembles machinery,
Mechanicals we now deprecate
And rank with dated, crude contraptions,
That nevertheless to Ettore are
Top-notch, state-of-the-art essentials,
Each with three thousand interlocked parts,
A baroquely balanced gizmodic chorus,
Thrown into motion when called on to play:
Gears and keys and springs and levers
And pawls and heavy heads that strike
With satisfying, resounding clacks.
Pianofortes of written language--
Advance, return. Advance, return,
And with a DING! eject a page.
Much later, Ettore's career successors
(Heirs in skill if not genetics)
Will fabricate far more evolved devices:
Calculators and desktop computers,
Laptops and tablets and do-it-all phones,
But nothing so primally tactile and pleasing
As those metal-boned beasts of bygone times.

Reviews

[emily.c.]

Love this. You hear the poetry and rhythm in the machinery and are waiting for the irony. Really lovely.