Elegy For My Smartphone – Terrible Poetry Contest

Elegy For My Smartphone

 

 

Bitter the world becomes

when you lose your smartphone

 

Time and again at the days beginning

when I used to switch my phone on

to see the latest notifications

I must now mourn it’s absence

there is no one I can now

communicate to without Twitter

or Messenger

 

Without it how do I dare

open the doors of my heart?

When before I used to happily post away

not ever needing to guard my thoughts

but with it’s loss my world dwindles

day by day, and passes away

 

Where has my Facebook gone? Where is Twitter?

Where has Tumblr gone? Where the texts? Where my

player of music?

Where the Uber Eats? And where the pleasures of

my solitaire app?

Sad at heart I bind my feelings in fetters

 

I dream I still have my phone

then I wake and it’s absence

is more heavy on my heart

aching for it’s touch screen

and it’s comfortable place in my hand

 

Nothing is easy in this world when

even our phones are in the hands of fate

here tweets are fleeting, here texts are

fleeting, here Snapchat is fleeting,

without my smartphone the whole world

becomes a wilderness.

 

 

Joanne Fisher

 

This was written for Chelsea Owens’s Terrible Poetry Contest #25 where we have to write an elegy for something we lose.

 

My favourite elegy is the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer, and so I based a lot of the poem on this as I wanted to capture its feeling. Anglo-Saxon poetry didn’t rhyme, in fact rhyming poetry wasn’t brought into English until a few centuries later.

 

Thankfully I’ve never actually lost my phone, though I have misplaced it occasionally. And I’ve never used Snapchat or Uber Eats…

 

Please buy me a coffee! 🙂