Poem Alone
​

​Twenty Seconds

Before long, we're told,
mammoths will draw crowds
at the zoo,

​we'll resurrect a microbe
frozen on Mars,
give birth to a dodo

in a Petri dish.
In 1860
a Paris bookseller

leaned into a horn
fashioned like an eardrum
and, with a boar's bristle

as a stylus
fixed to a membrane
of parchment,

captured the vibrations
of his vocal cords
on paper blackened

by smoke from an oil lamp.
For a century and a half
he stayed silent

until common software
released the twenty seconds
of Au Clair de la Lune

he sang. So simple
now, yet you,
whose quiet words

I could have saved
on a snippet of tape
or a throwaway phone,

are just a visitor
in my memory. I have
no DNA of your voice,

not even moments
scratched in lampblack
​with a pig's bristle.



Published in Waiting to Tango (Templar Poetry 2016)