THESE WORDS WILL BE WRITTEN ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO  
ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW 
 

I 

These specimens, these days, 
Oval Park’s cherry trees 
sleeved with white blossoms, 
the moon’s eclipse, a lunar 
rainbow, wild crocuses, 
azaleas, lilacs, glorious, 
the marigolds in the drizzly dawn.
What’s this, I ask the gardener 
in a garden in northern 
Battery Park City, this, 
in pink and violet bloom, 
an eastern redbud, this 
a Japanese sophora rain tree, 
these, echinaceas, zizia aurea.   
Bright blue, luminous, 
the harbor’s intricate sheen, 
gusts of gold wind, a child 
on the East River esplanade   
flying a Chinese kite. 

II

Three quintillion—three and eighteen zeros—
bytes of data created each day, algorithms 

in endless speed-of-light extractive circuits, 
bound by codes of absolute abstraction, 

an infinity of signs, every node computationally 
a virtual machine, capital’s Great Acceleration, 

the Capitalocene. 

III 

The memory of it now 
near in my mind, an entire world            
in a memory, Grandma takes me with her, 
a long drive from Pleasant Ridge 
past factories, tool-and-die shops, 
Six Mile and Van Dyke, 
Mount Olivet Cemetery, 
she holds my hand, each of us talking silently 
to Grandpa before his grave. “Pray to Grandpa,” 
Grandma says, “pray to him, not for him, 
Grandpa suffered on earth and now 
he’s in heaven, pray to him.” 
“Pray for what?” I ask. “For whatever 
you want Grandpa to pray 
to God for you,” Grandma says. 

IV

Now? Today? Thermobaric warheads 
vaporize bodies, zeroed-out a word 

for execution, zero-them a verb. “It’s 
a very strange feeling, to be on the wing 

of a thing that makes its own decisions,” 
General Jove confides off the record, 

“but we’ll get there, we’re training 
these algorithms as I speak.” High up 

in a silver linden a cardinal’s eyes 
are snapping. Language, a language   

that feels. Language, language violently 
pressured. Unemployed, Aaron suffers 

a stroke, unable to pay the ambulance bill, 
a two thousand dollar judgment against him 

in small claims court, he fails to appear, 
a warrant issued for his arrest, bail set 

at three hundred dollars he can’t pay, 
later that day he’s dead in a holding cell, 

an autopsy determining he killed himself 
having ingested strychnine poison. 

This poem was published in Commonweal’s hundredth-anniversary issue, November 2024.