Living Age Ciphers

Before breath learned shaping,
meaning flickered in the eyes,
a tilt of the head,
a hand carving invisible arcs through dawn’s cold air.

Grunts were flint-strikes,
sparking the first syntax against the cave wall’s patient ribs.
Symbols followed, bone-etched tallies, ash-smeared spirals,
minds reaching outward like vines hungry for a trellis.
Every stroke a quiet rebellion against forgetting.

Centuries swelled with sharpened voices,
monks bent over crude vellum like moons leaning toward tides,
pressing prayers into illuminated night.

Ink became a living river running beneath empires,
feeding printing presses that clattered like newborn storms.

Then came electric pulses:
telegraphs tapping Morse constellations,
radios humming iron lullabies,
screens glowing like captive suns.

Now our words scatter
through fiber-tangled galaxies,
emojis, hashtags, avatars,
each a neon seed begging algorithms to notice
its small, flickering want to be understood.

We stand inside this bright cascade,
monitors buzzing like restless beehives,
phones warming our palms like miniature hearths,
communication multiplying in shapes we have barely named.

Yet…

Still the question rises,
thin as smoke from an unseen fire:
But what guarantees truth?

Not us, who bend facts like reeds,
teaching machines our deceptions,
arguing with the very air as if its warming
were merely a rumor.

Consider…

Nature alone speaks without rehearsal.
A river doesn’t pretend its depth,
a leaf doesn’t counterfeit its green.
And if you listen,
really listen,
a single daisy opening at sunrise
will tell you exactly what