Last Rights

[Hawkman]

I watched her weeding ancient letters
crammed in an old WAAF bag,
messages from friends long dead,
reread, some saved, while others
torn to shreds and thrown away.

Sometimes she would pass me one
and I would struggle with the cramped,
old-fashioned hand, while she let slip
morsels of half-forgotten memory -
choosing how to be remembered.

And when she came to slip away
beneath my gaze, I kept the memories
alive, the things she shared,
together with the memory of sharing
with me, as she wished.

When I’m as old as she, what will I do?
Will I hoard obsolete computers
so the emails on their drives can be
sifted when it’s time, or will they all survive
in cyberspace, for anyone to find?

No choice how I’ll be remembered,
no favoured memories shared in writing
with a child, stimulating anecdotes
of long lost friends and loves
from the time before their birth.

Was my parent’s generation the last
to know true privacy in death? Their
selectively controlled self-portraits,
tailored for their children’s eyes.
Will my cyber footprint be the real me?

[PrinceMyshkin]

There's something a bit off about the question as you pose it in the last stanza, especially after the quiet confiding tone of everything that precedes it. There's that beautiful, ritual-like physical passing of documents hand-to-hand, but what exactly is it that will be different, or less, about your own imagined passing? The accessibility, to some imagined phantom cyber-voyeur, of everything or anything you ever sought to communicate, just doesn't cut it for me. Or is it that one cannot imagine the cyber-voyeur with the same particularity as the WAAF association of the dying old woman?

[hillwalker]

A poem of 2 halves - the first with such a natural, effortless flow to it; painting a very poignant picture of a child (?) sifting through mementoes with a loved one (a parent presumably).

But from verse 4 onwards (line 4 in particular where the reader suddenly trips over the word 'sifted') the poem becomes less lyrical, losing the meter and ending up almost like prose. I'm not convinced this was intentional.

I'm guessing that by the end the wish to convey the underlying message took over all other considerations.....

H

[Hawkman]

Prince: thanks for reading but I'm not sure I quite follow your comment. I think the point I was trying to make was that I am unlikely to leave anything behind at all... I am unlikely to clutter up my home with old computers with their obsolete programmes, just so I can occasionally access the odd 30 year old email. A letter one can keep, it doesn't need machinery to read it and it takes up little space. I'm far more likely just to ditch everything except what might be on the last PC I own. Thus personal exchanges are perhaps now more epheneral. I'm told that nothing on the net ever disappears though. Presumably it's available to anyone with the technology, but there will be no personal connection with anyone who is likely to do so. My online activities are mere statistics. The question being, are my statistics the sum total of me?

Hill, I'm not sure why you would trip over 'sifted' :) I agree the poem becomes less lyrical with the speculatory passages and you are probably right that the message was more important than the method. There is a problem I think in the connotation of 'child' I was thinking entirely in terms of adult children but I hoped that the implication of advanced age would make this clear. Writing "son or daughter" was just too cumbersome and 'offspring' was inappropriate.

Anyway, thank you both for reading and commenting. H

[hillwalker]

Hill, I'm not sure why you would trip over 'sifted' :)

I suppose it's the way I read it the first time round - 'can be' as and unstressed then stressed syllable - followed by 'sifted' (stressed then unstressed).....

and my reference to childhood was merely one interpretation (there is absolutely no need to identify who is doing the sifting - it's fine as it is) :-)

H

[Bar22do]

I'm not sure we can really choose how to be remembered, oh Hawk, for our listeners, however careful, will get their own perception of us and of how we want to be remembered... it's all so very subjective and memory does play tricks. Perhaps what's the most important is first to have someone to share with, a younger one who theoretically is supposed to survive us and who can be trusted as our memory's preserver ... if it's important at all to be remembered, that is.
Do we care, once we're gone?!!...
Like Hill and Prince I flew better with the first part of your poem, but enjoyed the whole reading as well as pondering the question you brought up... Regards and my good wishes, The Winged!
Bar

[Delta40]

I like the poignancy of the poem and how it shows us the memoirs of one generation to the wonderment of the next who are technologically bound. You have revealed something about the changes in communication and what a difference it might make about who we are at the end.

Put it all on a USB Hawk.

[Hawkman]

Thanks again hill.

Sweet Bar, Perhaps it would be better to be forgotten completely than to have certain memories exposed :D True, once we're gone there is little to care about one way or the other, but I'd prefer to be spared the cringe-making embarrassment at the thought of certain potential revelations while I lie in extremis awaiting release - lol. Maybe I should have kept this one to myself.

Delta, thanks for your kind words. I wonder how many different formats of storage will have evolved between now and then. Will I have to keep copying and pasting between programmes, will there be replication errors and ultimately, will there just be far too much for me to consider it worth the bother? I think I will settle for the last option. My official archivist can look after the outgoing stuff - lol.

Live long and prosper - H

[AuntShecky]

I've noticed a recurrent theme lately in the Personal Poetry
forum -- that is a heartfelt nostalgia for as well as a desire
to make a connection to the past, especially and specifically that of one's forebears. Maybe the reason for this is that the time for "Auld Lang Syne" is right around the corner.

Beyond that theme, this piece in particular takes it one step farther, as the speaker wonders if the physical mementoes saved in the generation of our parents will have equivalent counterparts from ours. Incidentally, the
word "memento" came from a ritual in the Catholic Church,
the same source of the sacrament of Extreme Unction, commonly called "Last Rites." (That's why I wonder if your
title is a play on words.)

Finally, your piece makes a cogent comment on a subject
which many people slough off of late -- privacy. I have to say I agree with you on that one, Hawkman.

This poem is certainly a worthy one, and thank you for
posting it.

[Hawkman]

Thanks Auntie,
I couldn't say what prompted me to write this piece now, but the memory came, so I wrote it. You are correct in your analysis of the underlying themes which I hope were explicit enough in the poem, rather than the subsequent expansion in my replies above. You are also correct in your interpretation of the title, the ultimate right of privacy, in and subsequent to, our last moments. A sacrement withheld? - perhaps now and for evermore.

I really appreciate your comments, Auntie. Live and be well. H

[blank|verse]

A well-written, nicely controlled and thoughtful poem, Hawk, good stuff.

I enjoyed the turn at the start of the fourth stanza, which marks the change from narration to reflection - it's certainly a well-used poetic technique, but it's well-used for a reason, and it works very effectively here.

However, I agree with others in finding the second half a bit more ragged - the last stanza is the weakest and I think the poem deserves to end more strongly than it does currently.

The only other amendment I would suggest is to change the word 'pries' at the end of stanza 4, it sounds too jovial-archaic.

Good one!

[Hawkman]

Thanks b/v. I'll give some thought to smoothing it out a bit. A little shave here and there and perhaps a little rephrasing will help.

Best, H

[Haunted]

Hawk, going through a parent's treasured memorabilia is an emotional experience and you articulated it so beautifully. Sadly I'm a techno hog. I saved the answering machines with voice messages of multiple ex's in boxes with adapters and tapes intact, and I upload their emails to the cloud as well, just to have it forever, even though I know I probably will never revisit them. Now you know how stupidly sentimental I am.

I almost feel there are 2 poems here and the shifting of thought and time, from nostalgic to cyber, from the memory of a parent to the paranoia of losing your privacy, is borderline sacrilegious. However, I appreciate how that ties back so perfectly to the title, a nice double entendre by the way.

[Hawkman]

Hi Haunted,

Something you should know about old tape recorders. The drive belts self destruct after about ten years. At this point they dissolve into something vaguely of the consistancy of printers ink and gum up the works. If you're serious about retaining your ex's voices for posterity you'll need to take the machines apart and keep replacing the drive belts! This is true by the way. I recently found that I couldn't play any of my cassettes. I hadn't listened to them for a long time, but when I tried, although the electronics were ok the decks were as dead as the proverbial dodo. Had to dismantle them all, clean the black goo off and fit new belts.

Glad you found something to like in the poem though :D

Live and be well, H

[firefangled]

Hawk, poems like these are important and worth our reading and thought. As with many good poems, there may be more here than you intended. Words are like soil. When we use them, each is like a sample of a type of soil, but in that sample of clay or loam are shells or pieces of garnet carried along that tell another story or give a different aspect.

In musing about the differences in how we pass on our personal images, you have exposed that our technology is perhaps moving faster than our ability to know how or what to keep for keeping's sake.

The "raggedness" of the second stanza for me is not so much that you found less poetry to express what is there, as much as perhaps that poetry is harder to come by at this point in time to express something so personal as mementos (in Auntie's words). Finding poetry in the artifacts of the 21st century is difficult because they are so new to us. Letters have been around for a long, long time. They are capable of keepsaking. So, I appreciate this poem very much for how it made me think. If you find other words for S2 to express this bifurcation of the old and new transferring of communication, all the better.

What is interesting about this phenomenon of difficulty expressing contemporary life with all its technology and legacy humanity mixed together is the difficulty reading the poetry it produces. When you think, "no ideas but in things" and the things are becoming newer and newer, we don't know them yet to use them fully. What poetry is still accessible deals mostly with the affect of this new world on legacy humanity as does your poem.

Forgive me for going on and on about this, but I found this poem very interesting for what it tells us. Perhaps in the future all we are will be in the clouds since that is the next wave of storage. And who knows where those clouds are. Maybe we are creating heaven as we live and evolve. It's been said the kingdom of heaven is within us. Maybe we're just now getting it to take form. Remember: All watched over by machines of loving grace. —Richard Brautigan.

Thanks for posting this.

[Hawkman]

ff, thanks for your considered response and I'm glad the poem gave you something to think about. I confess that the clouds reference both you and Haunted made is a new one on me. Does it imply that heaven is the ultimate mass storage device? Maybe it's what androids refer to as 'silicon heaven', the place where all the calculators go...

Live long and prosper and seasonal felicitations to all our readers.

H

[firefangled]

I confess that the clouds reference both you and Haunted made is a new one on me. Does it imply that heaven is the ultimate mass storage device?
H

Hawk, Cloud Computing is the latest storage technology. It is protected storage that resides remotely from computing and electronic devises, such as PC, laptops, phones, MP3 players etc. Your poem welcomed the comparison.

[Hawkman]

Thanks for that, ff. It's so difficult to keep up with the jargon! Having now looked up the term I see the relevence to the poem, but from the little I have read about it, cloud computing will not necessarily ensure that anything uploaded into it will be guaranteed to survive, or, like anything to do with computers, be secure.

Live long and prosper - H

[firefangled]

You are correct, Hawk. I work with this technology every day and computers are not entirely predictable or secure, but they are probably as secure, in the long run, as an old chest in the attic or celluloid tape.

Nevertheless, I think handwritten letters, however faded and brittle are the most accessible personal, and dear.