(after Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard)
The server’s hum dies slowly in the night,
The venture bells grow faint, then still their chime;
Where once the screens cast forth their fevered light,
Now shadows linger, watchful, lost in time.
The boastful cries of progress fill no more,
The eager throngs have wandered from the gate;
Where mighty claims resounded loud before,
Now silence reigns, and markets watch, sedate.
No grand design, no promised mind appears,
No PhD on call, no wisdom found;
But lists half-broken, maps dissolved in jeers,
A monument of error on the ground.
Here lie the hopes of Altman’s gilded tongue,
That spoke of dawns the silicon would raise;
The prophets’ dreams, on corporate towers hung,
Are ashes now beneath investor gaze.
The proud proclaimed that genius dwelt in code,
That scaling up would crown them kings of thought;
Yet empty proved the wide and costly road,
And trillions vanish chasing what is naught.
How fleeting all the visions money buys,
How soon the gilded speech turns thin and frail;
The shining graphs that sought to pierce the skies,
Now tell a tale of vanity and fail.
Nor wealth, nor might of Nvidia’s hand,
Nor echoes of the dot-com age reborn,
Could bid this fragile kingdom ever stand,
When truth revealed its promises forsworn.
Perhaps within these broken halls of dream,
A humbler craft, less burdened by deceit,
May rise — not crowned with gold, nor hailed supreme,
But measured, modest, human, and discreet.
Yet let us pause, and on the ruin dwell,
The tale of folly carved on every line;
The bubble bursts — a knell, a solemn knell,
To warn that time makes mock of all design.
No comments:
Post a Comment