The O Bheal Poetry Challenge words “braille,
strain, wood, bead, hope” suggested speculative fiction to me, so here is a
Science Fiction Poem...it's from the same hypothetical future with https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2016/11/kylene-has-two-children.html and https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/short-story-influencers.html .
Letter by letter
they braille the beads of wood
on strings across a hand-held wooden frame
one of them has invented.
They grew up
when what they called the Internet
was heavily subsidized by the enormous
corporations,
for free, and all existed.
Too many people
of those generations died of suinovirus
to keep the Internet or the corporations
or the United Nations funded.
No “big” things
are left, here; towns and businesses
are small; electronic communications are ancient
history
and by most people unlamented.
Only the old
ones born in the twentieth century
strain their fading minds to build facsimiles
of the toys they loved;
the “smart phone”
gadgets they used instead of talking
or signing or writing to one another
until their eyes overloaded—
they want those
back again, now in old age,
they cling to what they find the comfort
of communion with friends disembodied.
They can’t see
real faces across the common room,
and cringe from the exposure of speaking
words that might be overheard.
They dread touch,
and mostly made little eye contact
and tabooed looking at anything below face
level, when they were sighted.
They shun paper
that might be found and read
by others, as their ancient “text messages”
always were; that,
they ignored.
Paper’s not cheap
so nobody tries much to encourage
them to recapitulate the history of written
communication
before the time it collapsed.
Don’t tell them
the county council met and voted
against electronic experiments; reviving the Waste
Age
is their last, lost hope.
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