Artist

Alexander Averin

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Progress?




There is more to life than increasing its speed
Mahatma Gandhi


The F Word

 
Fast flies the new ‘F’ word:
fast bucks,fast speech, fast food,
fast broadband, fast cars,
fast planes, fast phones, fast trains,
even faster planes, even faster trains.
Fast news in short staccato bursts
(this and only this is what you
need to be fed today).
Education a game, degrees worthless,
genius sidestepped, 
no time in life for daydreaming,
imagination fades.
Eyes fixed on screens; brains shrinking,
attention spans reduced to almost nil.
Original thought struggles for survival,
(mostly missing, presumed dead).
Libraries closing, books burning,
those without souls worshipping speed,
uniformity and conformity.
Tick-box fanatics with disjointed thinking
wanting us to sacrifice our souls,
and meekly follow their commands
and to do it fast

 

Cait O’Connor

2 comments:

Friko said...

Hereabouts those who want us to sell our souls would have little success.

We value our souls, our slow and gentle speeds and deliberate thoughts.

Poetry does not lend itself to haste.

I shall take a look at the site you mentioned but I certainly have no objection to my last post being sent to a prose-poetry site.

Mac n' Janet said...

Sad but true. It's so good to have to time to just be.