Humans across the globe search the internet for the same things year after year— YouTube, Facebook, the weather forecast. Yet there are also things we search for only in the heat of a collective moment, such as the Blue/White dress or SpaceEx. In these ways, the internet offers objects both enduring and ephemeral.
Below is a selection of five trending search topics from June 2024 according to Google Trends and Exploding Topics, each accompanied by a relevant poem. Maybe you were looking for these.
1. Weather
Last weekend was humid in the Northeast and I read a poem called “He Watches the Weather Channel” by Charrie Shipers. Aren’t weather forecasts a sort of divination? Even when tech and satellites get involved, it’s still a prophecy, and one we each care about for some reason or another (or another, or more). We all want to know what happens next.
Read “He Watches the Weather Channel” by Carrie Shipers
2. Translate
Я говорю по-русски, et j'apprends le français. I once showed my son a
Russian-English dictionary and he said, “Oh, it’s just like google before they had the internet.” Why search books for words anymore when you can search the web? That’s why we’re here. Some still carry mini-dictionaries in their pockets, but many have been replaced by smartphones. Some carry lived experiences inside complex neural networks that navigate between tongues. Whatever your method, it’s useful to have a few languages attached to your person in some way.
Read “Bilingual/Bilingüe” by Rhina P. Espaillat
3. USA
In our global society, folks from all over hold a vested interest in the USA. The poet Mosab Abu Toha recently made a plea on Instagram for non-Americans to vote in U.S. presidential elections, “simply because a United States President is not, unfortunately, responsible for his people but for the people in the whole world.” The USA— it’s a confusing concept and I might need to google it, too. In “notes on the seasons,” Roque Raquel Salas Rivera explores the concept of national identity while also reviving our need to translate between languages. The poem in English never mentions the USA, but the Spanish version mentions usa, which translates to uses.
Read “notes on the seasons” by Roque Raquel Salas Rivera
4. Indiana
No doubt people in the U.S. have been googling Indiana with regard to Caitlin Clark, #SPORTS. But I knew that Indiana would be poetic. My great uncle lived there and his yard was full of bowling balls— full. Bowling balls of all colors and sizes. Bowling balls in bird baths, on stone walls, and in the garden. It may also be the first place I ever saw an osage orange, which looks like a tennis ball crossed with a brain. Yes, you could write a poem or two in Indiana. And Lindsey D. Alexander did.
Read “Sleepless in Indiana, I Contemplate the Age-Old Arts” by Lindsey D.
Alexander
5. Trump
Fatimah Asghar introduces her poem, “When the Orders Came,” with a quote rom former president Donald Trump’s administrative team: “[We are] calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Fatimah’s poem is profound and haunting in the way that only poetry can be, in the way that it bends tragedy and horror into a platform for compassion, healing, and change.
Read “When the Orders Came” by Fatima Asghar
I suppose we search the internet for whatever we’re curious about, and whatever
we’re curious about could probably become a poem. Maybe it already has.
Written by Allisonn Church
Writer Bio: Allisonn Church was born in a small rural community to a mother who pinned butterflies in glass cases and hid scarab beetles in her jewelry box. Her first favorite poem was “The Willow Fairy”’ by Cicely Mary Barker. Find a list of Allisonn's published work at churchpoems.wordpress.com.