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…
If I replace smartphone with notebook, I can get with this.
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Haha, so sad! Did your phone really die, or was this just for the contest?
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No it was just for the contest.
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Oh, good! You don’t need any more tech costs after all that mess in 2018.
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This is absolutely hysterical. So dramatic, Joanne. Thanks so much for making me laugh!
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Terribly true. I have internet access only in two places, none of them where I live at the moment, and even that is traumatic.. Smartphones, a bane or a blessing?
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I think they’re both. One time I didn’t have a phone for a couple of months and I read more and hardly went on the internet. I felt happier and slept a lot better.
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