Handwriting is a dying art,
the pen no longer mightier than the sword 
replaced by a keyboard—gone the way of
the stylus, inkstand, quill, scribblers and scribes, 
amanuenses, graphologists.

Will there never again be a Holmes 
remarking on a suspect’s letters... 
“There is vacillation in his k’s and 
self-esteem in his capitals.”

Will we forever lose literary archeology, 
ancient texts, scrolls, marginalia, gloss, 
Lucretius expounding On the Nature of Things, 
exchanges between Whitman and Emerson, 
Twain’s penciled one-way arguments,
Voltaire composing in book margins from prison, 
commentary on Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid.

Will a text message or e-book escape Delete
to patiently await discovery? Can they replace
the feel of pulp, a dog-eared page or the intimacy 
of a warm hand in letters between lovers,
Heloise and Abelard, Barrett and Browning or
the pleasure of finding a handwritten recipe
from my mother with my father’s teasing 
marginalia, “My mother’s was better!”