We started off with agency
When human hands held fast
To flag-fist, flowing runes
That spoke and swooped
To spell their way across the sky
In fabric-flapping consonants
And wind-enabled vowels.
In letters shifting fast
Then holding still
We shaped a coded wavering –
So knowing eyes could spy, and fathom out
Our words, our thoughts,
When ears, blown deaf with wind,
Sat cold… dead… spent.
What messages were brought like this
From ships’ cold sterns to Spurn?
To chart the beating, shifting heart of it
In silent symphonies of swirls
Conveying, and convening place:
High Binks
Long Bank
How Hill
Wyke Bight
Those flags have faltered now
That dance we made
Through fresh-wrought human industry
Is Dead.
Transmogrified, the folded fabrics speak no more
Our human-minted
Ballet-score of words is gone
A remnant corpse, meant just for those
Who knew and kept its ciphered score.
‘ ‘cos these days: OMG!!!!’
The pulse of human contact turns
To tap, to screen-swipe, failing battery. . .
And driving us
Insatiable
There swells beneath
A lust for endless energy –
To satiate a ceaseless need.
And in response, by science forged,
A Kevlar-limbed crescendo builds
With swooping arms, and turbine blades
Whose phrasing voice is forced and forged
By humming dynamo.
Until, perhaps quite soon, a point arrives
In which the all-consuming motor’s thrum
Provides us with a drone so strong
That all we humans do
(No-choice, no other way)
Is coyly dance, entranced.
While turning slow,
The windmill avatars
Emblazoned with epoxy-proxy hands,
Mark out our time
In fibreglass
And sweep our dead heart’s ghostly beat
Whilst faltering we try, but fail, to feel
Our surrogate:
Electron pulse.
