Poetry for Engineers: Ode to Very Small Devices

As fairies for the Irish or leeks for Welsh,
it’s the key lives of small hidden machines,
their junctures, and networks that encourage me:
Mystic hidden functionaries that make
our manufactured world dwell, courageous little servo motors,
whose couplers, whose eccentric fire-filled
sensors are encased in bakelite with brass
screws, who stare with purple eyes, who gauge moisture,
who discover tiny motions and reply,
whose cooling followers name out in white-noise
registers like older people singers–I can
virtually hear their earlier songs, their sturdy voices
now yelps, their thumps, their throbs, their hum, their chant–,
they click on, they whir, they’re despatched spinning
inside like teen women guffawing over boy bands.
Most of all: ones ready silently, concealing
the shock of their goal, duties not but recognized,
their true natures discovered solely in connections.

Those who pay attention, those who communicate,
those who management cool and warmth,
those who open doorways, those who lock
all of the issues that we’ve forgot,
those who conceal, those who disclose
these embedded in our garments
these in our ears, these in our hearts
those who deliver collectively, these an element
of divisions, these like birds,
like parrots that full our phrases,
these like fish, those who entrap,
those who free, those who freely flap
in fierce winds, those who change
what now we have misplaced, those who see
at night time, in fog, in brightness, in worry,
those who present what we maintain expensive,
those who tempt, those who repel,
those who purchase and those who promote,
those who maintain us alive, those who
don’t, gained’t, couldn’t and can’t.

Components of 1 thoughts, not mine, blunt orchestra
of data, bundles of feelers
reaching out to the touch us, educate us, information us
to kind higher futures higher understood.
Could your sounds, your chimes, your silence calm us.
Could your tender tendrils contact what we search.
Small elements changing into one being intertwined,
a world in itself, remind us to be sort.