I am an anachronism.
A morse telegraphist, clinging by my fingernails
to the last vestige of the age of telegraph,
while technology erases my world.

Does it matter?
Perhaps not by itself, but multiplied as it is
by the number of endangered occupations –
unheralded by clamouring conservationists –
it represents the passing of an era.

As a child (when schools still taught
those now-maligned "three Rs")
I read of Alexander and Napoleon,
of Pythagoras and Socrates,
and learned nothing of them as people.

To my ignorant child's mind
they had not really lived,
had not experienced triumph or despair,
knew aught of love or anguish;
they were simply names, flat letters on a page,
lacking substance.

Like those ancients, my kind are diminishing.
Our skills no longer needed we watch with apprehension
as obsolescence and retirement-dates converge,
fearful that our trades will pass too quickly
and we will find no work.

And as they pass, as our usefulness and purpose cease,
there is a sense of fading, fading,
so that I feel myself becoming two-dimensional,
insubstantial, like yesterday's people,
who faded in their turn and now are gone.