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Thus we watch with alarm
The supplanting of the sacred
And the sacrosanct;
The rise of the crass, the inane
And the profane.
The era of instant gratification is here
The ultra-new and the noveau-new;
The post-modern and its impermanence.
The hands of the clock,
Their inexorable ticking,
A warning for what lies ahead.
Infected by the disease
We succumb to the craze of the new
All surface sheen,
But hollow beneath the wrapping.
Shallow.
The march of progress
The power of invention
The shift in focus
From the lasting to the transient.
At midnight, today’s new
The here and now, is digitally obsolete
Replaced by its latest sibling or off-spring
Cross-fertilised and cross-pollinated;
A hi-tech personal almanac, styled and honed
To perfection; but already it is dated.
The latest is old
The old is ancient
The prehistoric;
A mere, fleeting moment
In the evolution of time.
But there really was yesterday
Between the dinosaurs and the digital age,
When substance and value were common words
When gravitas had real meaning,
Civilisation had a moral compass,
Boundaries and parameters.
They were our cornerstones;
Like the elder statesmen
Who founded constitutions and nations.
,
We built, created and constructed,
Used pens, brushes, and chisels,
Struck musical notes with dexterous fingers;
We touch buttons now,
Swipe screens and succumb to critical ennui.
In the fog of distant time,
Governed by rationale and thought,
Where the sidewalk and road
Lived in harmonious accord.
Nature wasn’t challenged or repudiated,
Conventions weren’t flouted or ignored;
Men would routinely disembark from a bus
To allow women to board
Not forgetting to doff their caps too.
It was only yesterday,
In dimly-lit taverns,
Poets recited their verses
Without being mocked. |
