Vandalism

Did you know that Charlotte Bronte’s husband

Tried to have her correspondence burned?

Shielding the hungry eyes of the future

Like a father shields their child’s from the sun.

Well, history remembers him as a would-be vandal,

Stopped from dimming that essential light.

This is why I find myself going broke,

Paying out increasingly obscene amounts

For those extra terabytes of iCloud storage

So that I might keep all ten years of our texts—

All the offhand photos they’ll come to call ephemera—

Lest even the smallest piece of you be lost to posterity,

And they forget the story of humanity’s finest work.