Telegraph

Mechanisms for transmitting words and thoughts and emotions across the gulfs of time and space are not exclusively recent phenomena.

This poem was written in 2012 as a fundraiser reward for the Chicago Writers Conference, and was later published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, May/June 2018.

“Aurochs, Horses and Deer” (2006), photograph by Prof Saxx via Wikimedia Commons, from a cave painting in Lascaux, France.

The telegraph was not invented in 1836
but three thousand years before Christ,
when the first writer took up a pointed stick
and traced out on papyrus the careful,
causal chain of coded symbols that
transmitted meaning across time and space
directly into a brain equipped to decipher it.

The telephone was not invented in 1876
but over five thousand years ago
when the first writer took up a pointed stick
and scratched out the vibrations in clay
that tickle the tympanic membrane of the heart
with thoughts conceived in days older than dirt.

Telepathy was not invented in 2170
but forty thousand years before Christ
when, by the light of smoky torches,
the first writer poured out his heart
in ochre, hematite, and charcoal,
unable in any other way to express
the experience of stalking a god,
and slaying it with a pointed stick. ∅