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  • The Singers



    Spoken word by Eleanor Jackson, with animation by Maeve Baker.

    Poetry
June 18, 2020 / Poetry / Eleanor Jackson

Transcript

In the end, it will be the singers who save us. When all the human computers are waving drowning drowning waving, pulled under by the riptide of our own sweet data, the biometric telemetric automatic hydromatic greased frightening of no kinds of unobserved existence, they will become. Witnessing a burning building, a fallen tree a crashing wave a hungry belly, they will fall out into the street and lament, saudade serenading this building this home this tree these people this day this island this glacier this music this loss. Standing in a precious nothing place, the tiny fragmented slivers of cities where no camera yet reaches, the inadvertent gap between the surveillance and sousveillance, sorrowing, raising the chorus of the charred child’s toy lying on the ground, the frayed branch the broken wing the empty belly lying on the ground, no child to hold it not anymore not now. There, in the night, all chiaroscuro against the always lit sky, or in the blistered morning or the still sticky afternoon or right before closing time when workers watch the clocks, they will start singing, over and over, calling the crowd from their never slept beds, no one raising phone enabling device engaging the vid-eye, knowing it to be the last precious thing – this, the singer who sings. They will take the song and pass it voice to voice in chains, everyone abiding the last unwritten law that this song these songs must stay unwritten unrecorded untraceable irreplaceable under the range angle and velocity of objects and permanence. We will pass them as the Iliad the Odyssey the slave song before it. We shall sing ourselves, the last atoms belonging to us, every tongue, every atom of us Whitman-sung, like current though copper water downhill the last whale crossing the ocean. No glaciers all volcano, saviours all sung.

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