ETHEREAL
The Facebook algorithm tells me I have
memories to share with friends – and when I look
I see that one of them died four years ago.
She was always a meticulous person
but seems to have neglected to leave details
of what to do with her Facebook account.
Now LinkedIn is encouraging me
to congratulate a colleague – deceased
these nine years – on his work anniversary.
Social media is filling with dead souls
that pass across our screens like shooting stars.
Maybe these are deliberate memento
mori; if accidental, permitted
by heirs celebrating the departed’s
sense of the absurd – or a casualness
about our commonwealth, like space debris:
the flecks of paint off bits of satellites,
an astronaut’s toothbrush, a rocket
lost, junked in the heavens.
Ian Craine
March 27, 2026I like this poem. My mobile phone address book is full of the departed. I can’t bear to delete them; each removal would seem somehow like the betrayal of a friendship. A bit fanciful perhaps but I think we writers can allow ourselves a little of that.
I rummage through the principal bookcase, a huge wooden concertina of a thing, easy to pack yet surprisingly capacious. An indexer’s bookcase wherein I find Gogol between Frazer and Kenneth Grahame. ‘Dead Souls’ is thinner than I remember (years since I read it) but next to ‘The Golden Bough’ most works look unfed.
Those three extremely fanciful works are I suspect merely a microcosm of the library they are part of. Full also of old friends.
Mary Clark
March 29, 2026Facebook allows you to save a relative’s page to a ‘Legacy’ account. Then it’s almost impossible to delete, I’ve found. I suppose FB counts all those souls in its billions of ‘users’ though it’s clear, or getting more clear, who is being used.
David Selzer
March 29, 2026That reminds me of Gogol’s DEAD SOULS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Souls