For Jean Jennings Bartik*

Knowledge is just a can of beans

or a bottle of vintage wine

or a London taxi-driver’s knowledge

or anything that can be described

and poetry’s just another kind of code

written in language most understand

enjoying rhythmic ambiguity

iambic meter often in demand

you wouldn’t use a poem to drive a machine

that understands only tens complement arithmetic

and Boolean algebra

proceeding step-wise with constant increment

yet the idea of what a machine can do is part of the poem 

unscrolling through time

from standing stones to rolling wheels

flying

while it’s hard to compute philosophy

which curves in time haphazardly

not like simply counting beans

the art in it is to code it well

*(who programmed the ENIAC, first US electronic computer, and was a senior editor at Auerbach Publishers, a loose-leaf subscription service, where I worked before moving to Minnesota to join Cray Research, Inc. in 1976)

Richard M Russell © Dick Russell

May 4th 2022, 2023