Apologies to a Tree
Sam Love
My fingers fly across the keyboard
converting bursts of mental images
to words destined to drown
in the digital Tsunami
flooding the internet.
Internet moguls offer to store
my ramblings on the cloud,
but my gut tells me
clay tablets and paper
will outlast the modern cloud,
vulnerable to one underpaid employee
hitting the delete key
or slipping a coded worm
in the program’s back door
or some Russian password scavenger
overloading host servers
with misspelled Viagara offers
So with whispered apologies to trees
I hover my mouse’s cursor
over the print button and click,
counting on paper to survive
a solar electromagnetic pulse
that will fry computer storage
and wipe clean the digital age.