.
.
Shanghai’s Robo Dogs
With quick unnatural steps, and side to side
Focusing glances, robo dogs preside
And prowl the streets. They wear their growls in little
Speakers around their necks, their barking spittle
A blare of words: Go home, home now, now go.
They click, record, and scurry to and fro
On double-jointed limbs, metallic bones.
They’re quickly joined by dark and hovering drones
That troll the high-rise skies and reprimand
The nighttime cries for food. The drones demand
“Control your soul’s desire for freedom! Do
Not open windows! Do not sing!” Who knew
That hunger’s aria was humming just
Outside so many balconies, a gust
Of air that makes the starved bird scream, or sing,
As soon as darkness hides the face and wing.
.
.
Maura H. Harrison is a poetry student in the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of St. Thomas. She lives in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Great poem, Maura!
The shape of things to come – and already here!
A chilling poem.
Thanks for the read, Maura.
Terrific, another nightmare realized.
A truly masterful work of poetry. Thank you.
Maura, an absolutely terrifying nightmare of the future. I have seen the scary video. Thank you for a real bone-chiller of a poem.
Was that robot dog in China built by Boston Dynamics in the U.S.A.?
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2021/0730/All-bite-and-no-bark-Robotic-police-dogs-force-debate
Maura, you have captured (in creepy, vivid imagery) the draconian influence that threatens our freedom, and you’ve done it admirably within a poem that the world should hear. Thank you!
Splendid poem on Shanghai at present, with allusions to the tradition of “Sympathy” by Paul Laurence Dunbar and “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou. Top-notch couplets and an effective reading of them. The black poets’ contrast of caged and free birds is taken to another level of horror by the prohibition of singing. The Shanghai silence is worse than the American singing, and indeed worse than the Auschwitz starvation bunker, where Nazi guards paid no attention to what prisoners were doing as they died deprived of food.