The End

Photo credit: the last photos of nuclear tests from China, 1996, You Tube Military History series.

I’ve spent three weeks reading an incredible novel call The Hand of Fatima by the Spanish writer, Ildefonso Falcones, an exhaustive account of the persecution  and final expulsion of the last Moors from Spain in the 16th and 17th centuries. Last night I attended the first night of Jimmy Murphy’s play called The Kings of Kilburn High Road in Dublin’s Gaeity Theatre and left there feeling the sad anguish of oppression, oppressor and oppressed.

And for all that time, him writing there

he wondered was he spent?

did words, verse and sense

present themselves

like stakes or briars

in a fence?

did sane anthologies appear

 by dint of Melvil Dewey,

the integrated library system

or the library management system/

Or, perhaps mysteriously

and even more sinisterly,

by a decision to avert the cost?

the cost of what, you wonder?

why the cost of destroying

all that will soon disintegrate

to nothing but a digital memory

of everything that can be preserved,

controlled, manipulated,

distorted.

Don’t look surprised, that’s how it it is.

You’ve created, twitted, facebooked,

snapchatted, whatsapped and vibered

the pinteresting world you live in,

welcome to a world that,

by a bizarre paradoxical twist

of technology, you made.

Or did you? Now there’s a question.

Are we minions of our own realm

in a digital world

of our own design and manipulation,

so we can argue egg or chicken

and so resolve our own

destruction?