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The New Attach�

By : Tanay Kumar Das ( Posted on :31 Mar, 2006 )

Total Views : 156 | Previous | Next

How strange to receive your email
Minutes after mine was sent.
Zip. Zap. It�s done.
Messages spiriting around fiber optic wire,
The collective we call Cyberspace,
The interconnectivity of all things,
A superhighway of electrons,
Moving at the speed of thought.
Suddenly, we have at our keyboards
The stuff dreams are made on.

By pony Express, in the old west,
It would have taken
A couple of horse whipping months
To send a message of India ink on rice paper
Half way across the North American continent.

In the time of Rome, only Caesar
Or one of his general�s
Could have gotten the message through
The miles of lonely rivers,
The hundreds of chariot wide rocky roads,
The battalions slugging it out in the muck and mire.

An older Horace would have preferred email
Written from a young boy
Rather then, by you, my new friend:
A young boy to fill him in
On the latest leisure time activities:
Sun bathing Euro style on a frothy beach,
Sleeping off a night of club raving,
And mischievous thumbs in a couple late night pies.
That would have given the Latin
A leathery Romanesque smile,
Or perhaps, even, a drop of sweaty stain
On his flaxen haired shirt tails.

My tastes are not quiet so exotic
Although by education and birth
I was required to read Him in the original
Worse agony then riding the bottom soring Express
On the hot dusty trail,
Mumbling what is no longer spoken:
Eheu fugaces labuntur anni.
(Alas, the fleeting years slip by)

Horace would certainly have approved
Of his words swirling at the speed of email.
I can see him typing into his Roman computer
On his Sabine farm outside the hurried city.
I�m sure of the pictorial orgies of the net
Would have made him rise to attention,
But his sense of decorum did not include
Our sense of middle class humdrum egalitarian freedom,
The empowering individual driving the web.
A free-the-slaves slogan would have given him the shivers:
Perish the Roman thought.
Who would tend the fields?
Shovel the shit?
Empty the cisterns?

And now as astronauts cruise the ionosphere
Constructing an orbiting space home
For those privileged few
Who wish to escape earth�s gravitational pull,
We can only wonder when we look up at the stars
And hope a God is listening
To our bedtime prayers
That our voice will sing out to the heavens
And be heard.
Because Lord knows
With satellites atwitter to our chagrin
Someone on earth has surely tuned in.

Written By : Tanay Kumar Das

Visit personal website of Tanay Kumar Das

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