Errata Slip Poem by Jared Carter

By an unfortunate error a number of lines
were somehow left out of the preceding pages.
But the book's finished now, and the time
for making changes is past. In other ages
corrections were dropped in loose, on a slip
of paper, but nobody ever read them, or cared
if it should have been 'tripe' and not 'trip, '
or the heroine been not 'speared' but 'spared.'
And now that words are processed, we ourselves
no longer need to spell or punctuate;
software provides a group of learnéd elves
to shift our prose from third- to second-rate.
Farewell, then, fluttering slip of old errata!
There are no slips, when everything is data.


First published in Light Year ‘88/9.