by Pamela Ahlen
Leave the smartphone home
and roam Thoreauvian,
it’s not too late to delete the techno-tweets—
take to the woods where text is sensory,
scent of leaves, honeysuckle, pine,
language welling up from the earth’s throat
where information resides in hearts of trees—
texture of ash, butternut, beech,
the bee lost in blue gentian reverie,
the sweet tang of berries purpling your tongue.
Thoreau wrote men have become the tools of their tools.
What made Thoreau so prescient?
What madness made us devices of our devices?
Time in the wood’s a stopped clock
velveting the marrow of you.
Listen to the stream’s soliloquy,
the hemlock sigh,
the oven bird squeak its rusty wheel—
no phone vibrating its pseudo-seduction.
photo credit: Irinia Iriser, Unsplash