Drone
Do strangers make you human
Science fiction visiting bodies as cold fact
What unknown numbers govern our genes or phones
A constant thrum from outer space
Snow makes a sound in sand
You are seen from far far above
Unheard and vanished
bodies dismember to dirt
Hardly alive, hardly a person anymore
Who will I be next and in that life will you know me
Copyright © 2016 by Kazim Ali. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 20, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Drone’ considers our lives with drones in the sky which may kill us or just capture our images and/or our ‘data.’ But it also considers the ‘drone’ in classical Indian music, which has a different role, that of giving the temporal its constancy, a way of seeing the divine endless in the momentary. Which drone is which? Who is god now?”
—Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali
