.

Inklings

Shut off that damn brainwashing, numbing screen!
Tonight I did. I reached, opened that book.
From sentences, the mind gleans what it means.
What happens when we painstakingly look?

We visualize and vocalize the text
And enter in the flow between the lines.
Carried along, we wonder what comes next.
Shun all concepts! Fill up a glass of wine,

A cabernet chilled with vanilla scent.
See it—swirl it—smell it—sip it—zest it.
Savor the wine’s bouquet, it’s tart accent
And on that beach, let’s swoon… all is moonlit.

Those screens bombast our minds. Zombied we stare.
Images flash and we’re lobotomized
As gray matter shrinks from never-ending glare.
We root down in our seats—anesthetized.

A book is the mind’s screen. We generate
Reality. On that beach, toast your glass
And in each other’s eyes, look and fixate…
Never hearing the gusts through sea oat grass.

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Peter Venable has been writing poetry for fifty years and his poems have appeared in The Lyric, The Merton Seasonal, The Christian Century, and other publications. More of his work can be found at petercvenable.wordpress.com. His “Roofless Church” merited an Honorable Mention in The Best Poems of 2024 in the SCP’s International Poetry Competition.

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2 Responses

  1. Paul A. Freeman

    This poem interests me on several levels, Peter, and raises a lot of questions.

    Knowledge, history, storytelling used to be the purview of specific members of society in the past and was oral, committed to memory. The advent of the written word, quill and paper led to the storage of knowledge and history, while storytelling, I suppose remained with specific tribal and clan members.

    When the printed book came on the scene, apparently there was a similar feeling as there is today with screens. Productive people were wasting too much time with their noses in frivolous novels. Meanwhile, a large number of old stories, threatened with becoming forgotten, were saved by the efforts of the Brothers Grim, academics who saw traditional storytelling dying out, collected them together and put them in a book (though they self-censored for the second edition).

    So, the question is, are we just fuddy-duddies standing in the way of progress when we talk about screen zombies.

    For the record, I’m on your side, though I feel we’re King Canutes in the final analysis, battling not against a tide of what I call ‘dummy fodder’, but a tsunami. Then again, with my qualms about ChatGPT, etc, and cheating, didn’t we cheat by using dictionaries and thesauruses, instead of training our brains?

    As for your poem, Peter, the fourth quatrain really summed it up for me. I recently escorted a group of visiting tourists around some major sites of London, but most were ‘scrollers’, interested in nothing more than the group pic and selfies in front of Buckingham Palace or Big Ben (Queen Elizabeth II Tower), though they did perk up at the WWII Women’s War Memorial when I told them that my grandmother worked night shift in a munitions factory during the Blitz. I felt like the old storyteller who would soon be superseded by the march of time.

    Anyhow, I’ve rambled on enough. Thanks for the read.

    Reply

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