Whenever I sit and think of today,
burgeoning with far new possibility,
I say to myself, sometimes, young as I am,
“Get ready for the future, kid.
It’s gonna hit you hard.
You might just in fact really be
among the last ‘real’ people ever to live.
What once was only talked about,
is today coming to fruition.”
Will I one day tell my children
about these times I’m living through?
I can see myself one day,
sitting in a chrome-glass kitchen,
a glass of tea or whatever-we-will-drink
perched on the table in front of me,
I a sordid fifty-five, but looking twenty,
and a young one (will there ever more be?)
next to me in a slippery seat, his or her feet
dangling an inch above the ground,
both of us thinking about “the good old times,”
each one in our good own way.
The child doesn’t know.
How once people drove themselves in cars.
How there were big long highways,
people behind wheels, eyes intent on the road,
steering so as to keep safe the eager passengers
who had put their lives in the hands
of the one who would ferry them on.
Now, of course, the cars themselves
course those paths unaided.
How once, people wrote books.
They wrote poetry.
There was Homer and Chaucer.
There was Shakespeare and Donne.
There was Rumi, and Khayyam.
And the great texts that first stirred
in heart and mind of man, the fire
of fervor, and sanctity, the tales
of gods and men, that shaped the world
as we had come to know it;
before, that is, its greatest change yet.
Now, a computer will write like Whitman –
if, that is, you tell it to.
How once, people would stand behind a counter,
in those things called “stores,”
and they would ask you about your day
while they rung up the goods you paid for
with a card, or a fistful of cash.
How, before they figured out how
to know where we are, whenever we are –
“they” (of course) being the Ones Who Know –
there were addresses, to identify your location.
That, before this Big Brother.
How we shot satellites into space,
and rocket ships, in all their various forms;
about our first forays into the cosmos:
costly, keen, and yes, dangerous,
still in our fragile human substance.
How, once, we were pure human,
none of this half-and half we will come to be.
How there was disease, and doctors;
how we then trained machines as our replacements,
to diagnose and deal with those illnesses,
starting slow, halting at first:
but how, in time, the machines came to cure
what before would have been death to millions.
How once there was the staunchest opponent
to all the world, to all things that lived:
yes, this one-time foe, of course, was Death.
I can see myself there,
telling to that little boy, that little girl,
the way things were, way back when.
In a world that is all mind and metal and mechanics,
will we still feel the breath of emotion,
of love’s tender bloom, or even the sorrow
of longing and of loss?
Or, will love die in favor of machines?
And do we have a choice?
So, I’d say, get ready for the future, kid.
It’s gonna hit you hard. But, whatever may happen, let’s all get there together.
