"Obsession: Etched in Stone" by Carol Hamilton, Poet of the Week

Obsession: Etched in Stone

Carol Hamilton

Does legacy haunt every writer’s heart,

so for each work we look for fame

and drop by drop seek a flood?

I save my words as if they mattered,

but Jon empties dumpsters in Kansas,

said the libraries sacrifice old books

to the landfill in torrents.

Dumas had his builders chisel

titles of all his novels into the stones

as they built his home. I scribble letters

across the page, and when finished,

I fill files and flash sticks, then nest 

them into The Cloud. Yet folders, papers, 

even clouds tend at last to drift away.

Poet’s Notes:  My friends and I are of the age to wonder what our progeny will ever do with the volume of paper we have used, saved, backed-up, filed and obsessed over. And then I remember all of my mother's saved documents we gave up to the landfill. I still have her special writings and published pieces, but she only wrote now and then in her later years. It often occurs to me that the world will surely go merrily on its way without any of my myriad scribbling. But my behavior belies this knowledge. 

Editor’s Note:  This is a nice, modern take on the classic sonnet form with alliteration and consonance taking the place of rhyme.  I love the way Hamilton brings the universal and eternal yearning for immortality into the present by referencing the past.