Ancestry.com
When time trickles away
and my body is lost to it,
one more soul among a trillion others
that float freely in the ether,
what memory hand will snatch me back?
To whom will my words speak?
Will they be pressed between the pages
of a few obscure books
on a dusty backroom bookshelf,
or laid away in the corner trunk
of a great granddaughter’s attic?
Will a wondering descendant a century hence
crack open crumbling pages
and marvel at the quaint turns of phrase,
as flowers from a long gone field?
More likely I will survive
in bytes and bits,
emojis of a distant past
strewn throughout a digital record,
archived, if I’m fortunate, annotated,
my googled past laid bare.
Really neat take on the idea of what, if anything we leave behind. It would be equally neat to see another additional stanza or two with a turn to the present to see how the reflection in the preceding stanzas changes “your” actions or outlook.