A poem published in the Arab literary culture magazine, Asameena. It is a take on the global vanishing of the warm incandescent yellow lightbulbs as the cold dystopian LED takes over.
“Look around you at a world that has changed, you’re aging and wasting energy. It is better for you to hurry up and die!” snapped Fluorescent and LED.
“I’m more than a string of incandescent lamps on a film star’s mirror,” Lightbulb replied.
“The sun daily melts away but never forgets to breathe her yellow warmth into me to guide writers through the night’s solace.
The fire that merrily hops across candles on a romantic date is my patron.
While you’re the frozen food aisle that escaped into the world and unleashed a devastating plague,
My light inspired by fire, your light, born of nightmares.
You worship numbers, I write stories,
You deepen anxiety, I soften melancholia,
You sterilize hearts, I mend them,
You spread shapelessness, I shape contours,
You show clothes, I reveal souls,
You make customers, I make humans,
You’re bland ideology, I’m passionate philosophy.
What crimes have you committed on the streets of Rome? Turning a stroll along an ambient-lit cobbled lane into a hasty getaway?
You’ve imposed a death sentence on the eternal city, for even Nero’s great fire emitted a dignified splendor.
My golden halo hovering over every city slowly bursts – one by one – at the hands of petty bureaucrats for your white glare to blow up into a mushroom cloud – the inferno of the same.
One big stadium is not what a city makes.
Yet perhaps my mystery and refinement can no longer find a home in a world robbed of imagination,
I part with these last words,
Fraudulent LED, you’re merely the chemotherapy to Fluorescent’s eye cancer,
Perilous Fluorescent, while you linger on only to expel mercury, my tribe will be reminisced for giving glory to Mercury.”
~Amro Ali (Alexandria, December 2017)