Today’s prompt invites us to bridge poetry and technology, where ancient themes meet modern textures: love as a read receipt, grief as an undeleted voicemail, memory as something stored but rarely revisited. Poetry has always strengthened with us, and today’s piece leans into that tension—where something deeply human tries to survive inside systems built to store, compress, and replicate it. I call this one Cloud Storage.
💾 “Cloud Storage” explores the fragile intersection between human memory and digital preservation—where love, grief, and absence are no longer held in physical spaces, but compressed into data, waveforms, and unfinished uploads. It reflects on how technology promises permanence, yet often delivers distance: preserving moments without restoring their warmth. The poem lingers in that tension between what is saved and what is still lost. 📖
“Cloud Storage”
I backed you up
somewhere between
a forgotten password
and a late-night upload
the progress bar stalled
at ninety-nine percent—
like grief
refusing completion
your voice lives now
in a waveform
blue peaks and valleys
I can scroll through
but never touch
I press play
and the room fills
with compressed memory—
loss, reduced to size
somewhere, a server hums
holding what’s left of you
in climate-controlled silence
no dust, no decay
just data
and me,
still trying
to download
what it meant
to lose you.
I love this poem, Richard, from the opening stanza to last. I especially love the simile ‘the progress bar stalled at ninety-nine percent— like grief refusing completion’. How strange the thought of ‘no dust, no decay just data’.
Is there anything worse than a progress bar that stalls at 99%? I think not! Wonderful work here.