More Words

There are more words written than ever read,

Now, let's try to hold this in our heads.

The thread begins with the dead.

Functional and with purpose, they began the thread.

A Sumerian accountant 5,126 years ago got ahead,

Struggling to hold numbers in their head,

Wrote them down instead on clay for a later day.

A mere 550 years from that day, an Egyptian dropped the clay,

Too heavy to carry when carting hay,

Started to log and diarise on papyrus each day.

Some argued that clay was here to stay

When the Epic of Gilgamesh appeared on clay,

Marking a significant day 2100 years before the Common way.

Then the numbers stopped when philosophy came to play,

It was Prisse Papyrus's day to enter the literary fray,

And yet, clay was still here to stay as Gilgamesh

made a complete and final appearance on a day

1200 years before the common day.

The words had proliferated to a point

that there was more and more every day,

So Alexandria came to play,

Building a library still explored today.

A place of systemic collection and dissection

with hand-copying at play.

Meanwhile, a mere hop, skip and a jump away,

The eastern people came to play,

Producing the first paper of the day,

Some 50 years before the common way.

With 105 common era years put away,

The East accelerated the paper way,

Giving us the paper we use today.

Now, clay gave way, no longer the surface to scribe,

But the printing blocks of movable type inside,

A mere 3,500 years to the day,

As the Chinese re-entered the fray,

The first mass production of the day,

As in 600 to 700, common day mass production started away,

Everyone got out of the way.

In 1000 common era, a new genre entered the fray,

A Tale of Genji shows a novel way.

It would be another 450 years to the day

That Gutenberg's press would begin to press away,

With 20 million books by 1500 CE, come what may.

This was around the time the political began to prey.

In 1837, clay would again come out to play,

Not to compete in a paper way,

But as insulators of the first digital way,

With telegraphy making its way,

Electrical transmission had come to play.

But ultimately, paper was still the way,

Although words were finally shared at a pace that dismayed.

Then the cathode ray on a 1940 day began to accelerate the way.

Over the next 60 years, we found our screen ways,

First, a computer display on a 1951 day,

Then the way of the web on a 1991 day.

In 2007, like rockets into our pockets,

The iPhone was here to stay.

Did this flag the end of paper's day?

No bloody way.

Now though it's dilemma's day,

With LLMs marking the way,

Words themselves make more every day.