Blue, Green, Red and Purple: E-mail
No phone calls, no letters…then, salt in the wound, no new e-mail. Betty Collins’s poem concerns loneliness in an electronic age.
when the telephone doesn’t ring
it merely sits there, silent;
when there are no letters,
the postie slips away, unseen.
friends who don’t come uninvited
don’t offer excuses.
But the red-hot computer, my dears,
after you have strained your eyes,
hunched, and twisted, developed R.S.I
The computer, my dears, gloats;
Sorry, it says. You don’t have any new mail.
That, in my book, is rubbing salt in the wound
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