Read Ralph Earle’s poem from the October 2026 issue
After retiring from IBM as a senior software engineer in 2017, Ralph Earle has published two poetry collections.
My job is to translate
dry and unrelenting code
into a user interface of surpassing beauty.
With my mouse, I roll one pixel after another
up the vast anthill of the internet.
My dream is to translate
the visions of the holy ones
into a communication protocol
of universal wonderment.
I want to launch shreds of light into the air
to fall like a layer of diamonds
on the endless mountains of the Web.
Don’t imagine these dreams are limited
by the LANs of the software lab.
Between here and the ultimate
unlimited interface of my aspirations
lives a dazzling darkness,
wide as the universe and thin as a hair.
Ralph Earle joined the IBM Software Lab in Raleigh, N.C., in 1990 as a technical editor and retired as a senior software engineer in 2017. While at IBM, he coauthored Enterprise Computing with Objects: From Client/Server Environments to the Internet for Addison-Wesley’s Bloch-Jacobson-Rumbaugh Object Technology Series, and he published articles in technical journals, including IEEE Computer Magazine, IBM Systems Journal, Distributed Computing, Management Directions, and Object Magazine.
In retirement, Earle has flourished in a second career as a poet. His poetry collections are Everything You Love Is New (Redhawk Publications, 2024) and The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and comanages a monthly poetry series at a Chapel Hill, N.C., bookstore. His poems have appeared in many print and online outlets, including The Sun, Carolina Quarterly, and Sufi Journal.
Source: IEEE Spectrum
