Arlene Corwin Poetry

You Can’t Beat A Book✍️📚📖📕📗📘📙
All kinds of new and fangled means –
The latest bangle; trendy,
Industry’s technology
Will never meet
The human need to touch and fondle.
Who can touch a digit?
You can fidget with devices,
Till the cows come home.
Nothing can replace a tome.
What woman in a bookclub
Would prefer to dub
An ebook as the next weeks title?
Scrolls and parchment are immortal,
Reproducible for centuries.
Digit language zero/one can only chortle
As each zero/one ceases to be
In cyberspace vacuity.
Throughout all time
Books have been memorised,
Their novelists immortalised.
Would you feel wise, have won a prize
By memorising words you’ve seen
On screens backed by machines
You can’t depend on?
I am sure you’d rather
Smell the leather
Etched by some expert engraver
With a genius and a love for covers.
You cannot beat a book
For reading, touching, smell and look
With not a cell that needs rebooting.
It’s in a man’s genetic cast
To hit upon ideas; the race is curious.
But progress is a crook that hooks,
Invites yet blights for just that reason:
Both a blessing and a prison.
Books have content, naturally.
Bad, good, middling, for they
Represent the sweep of thought
In all its magnanimity,
Eventual polarity.
I write about the book as object,
And maintain you cannot beat
A book for ‘tweeting’
And completing thought as art.
You Can’t Beat A Book 11.28.2018 The Processes: Creative, Thinking, Meditative II; Arlene Nover Corwin