I was reading an old copy of The New York Review of Books from May 23, 2019, when I came across a poem by Robert Pinsky that caught my attention. Pinsky is a former Poet Laureate of the United States who composed one of my favorite poems, “Samurai Song,” which I urge you to read. In the poem below, Pinsky takes on the smartphone zombies our time:

Being a Ghost

When they die I become a ghost
Afloat from room to room as vague
In grief as when I can’t find my keys.

Some say zombies became popular
Just when phones became so smart
We began staring into them entranced.

Alone without my dead to phone
I’m left adrift as when I can’t
Remember a name I know I know.

Shadowy appalled ghost-mind aghast
At the crowd of names stranded alive
Ashore outwaiting my shadowy boat.

The last stanza surely refers to Charon, the boatman to Hades on the River Styx. The fare: One obol.