The Islanders

The islanders we met were digital natives;
bronzed and nubile, their ankles garlanded
with flash drives fashioned from conch-shells.

They spoke an elevated form of hypertext,
interspersed with Java: a dialect
I recognised as coded status updates.

At dusk they danced a ritual waltz,
the men intoning Windows logoff
as the sun passed over the horizon

and the elders tuned into bootleg Wifi signals,
invoked the souls of obsolete technology,
ancestral operating systems that were here

when the land was new. Early settlers
taught them how to farm, to tend the land,
keep imported Tamagochi as livestock.

The women showed us how they worked
the pulpy Sega plant into a pixelated broth,
set their hair with braided power leads.

The youth assigned us island names:
I was 'Sonic' – on account, they said,
of my speed in the hunt when we tracked

the wild software through the jungle
to the centre of the island
where the outcasts lived, those

who’d given up the old ways,
switched their mobiles off,
refused to check their emails,

traded silicon chips for rifles, set off
on merchant ships for distant lands
beyond the range of gods and elders.

When one year passed, I took an island wife
compatible to me, installed her in a makeshift
hut with views over the bay. Her Firewall

was good, but I was unrelenting. I thought
it was a thing like love, but she insisted
I just had the caps lock on.