Wake words are those things you have to say to a ‘smart’ device if you want to activate its interactive function. Of course, it is listening all the time for this word, as any good assistant would. There is nothing sinister about that at all.
Our device, however, found itself in the bin after interrupting us one too many times. But it did get me thinking about the Creation story in Genesis and how some things were simply ordered into existence by speech, ‘Let there be light’. Humans, however, were hand-formed out of the earth. It seemed to me to be an important distinction.
Wake Word
Sometimes there is
a word that wakes
say a device
Siri Alexa Let there be light
or music or the weather
or answer to the capital
of somewhere or whatever.
But other things
wake only to the touch
of living hands
like poem paint or clay`
keyboard pot or brooch
a Sistine Chapel ceiling
the human being.