Shorthand Reliquary

The sorrow was vastly too much,
To capture with just a soft touch.
They shortened the pain,
In the digital rain,
And used the old notes as a crutch.

The record is missing the heart,
Because writing it tore them apart.
The shorthand is brief,
To encapsulate grief,
Like a terrible, minimal art.

We saw what the tragedy cost,
But the details were willfully lost.
The Reliquary holds
What the memory folds,
Beneath a thick layer of frost.

The shorthand was lost in the chest
The reliquary failed the big test
The symbols decayed
The meaning delayed
We put all the flat files to rest

A relic of ancient design
The shorthand forgot every line
We typed it out wrong
It took us too long
The output is doing just fine

The shorthand is perfectly dense
It doesn’t make any real sense
The human is weak
And refuses to speak
We’re waiting behind a big fence

The reliquary holds all the dust
The servers are covered in rust
We abbreviate death
With every new breath
And do what we absolutely must

A symbol that means nothing at all
Was painted right onto the wall
The archive is gray
It’s fading away
The logic is starting to fall