Poetry for Engineers: Ode to Very Small Devices

As fairies for the Irish or leeks for Welsh,
it’s the key lives of small hidden machines,
their junctures, and networks that encourage me:
Mystic hidden functionaries that make
our manufactured world reside, courageous little servo motors,
whose couplers, whose eccentric fire-filled
sensors are encased in bakelite with brass
screws, who stare with purple eyes, who gauge moisture,
who discover tiny motions and reply,
whose cooling followers name out in white-noise
registers like older folks singers–I can
nearly hear their earlier songs, their robust voices
now yelps, their thumps, their throbs, their hum, their chant–,
they click on, they whir, they’re despatched spinning
inside like teen women guffawing over boy bands.
Most of all: ones ready silently, concealing
the shock of their objective, duties not but identified,
their true natures discovered solely in connections.

Those who hear, people who converse,
people who management cool and warmth,
people who open doorways, people who lock
all of the issues that we’ve forgot,
people who disguise, people who disclose
these embedded in our garments
these in our ears, these in our hearts
people who carry collectively, these an element
of divisions, these like birds,
like parrots that full our phrases,
these like fish, people who entrap,
people who free, people who freely flap
in fierce winds, people who change
what we’ve misplaced, people who see
at evening, in fog, in brightness, in worry,
people who present what we maintain expensive,
people who tempt, people who repel,
people who purchase and people who promote,
people who maintain us alive, people who
don’t, received’t, couldn’t and can’t.

Components of 1 thoughts, not mine, blunt orchestra
of knowledge, bundles of feelers
reaching out to the touch us, educate us, information us
to type higher futures higher understood.
Might your sounds, your chimes, your silence calm us.
Might your tender tendrils contact what we search.
Small components changing into one being intertwined,
a world in itself, remind us to be variety.