Poetry for Engineers: Of Code and Shortleaf Pine

Read Ralph Earle’s poem from the November 2026 issue After retiring from IBM as a senior software engineer in 2017, Ralph Earle has published two poetry collections. I step into the warm moist airamong the columns of the pines,their net of twigs and rootscomplex as any lines of code. The trees purify and anchor.Their branches balance my restlessness. Their calling is to be present,mine to develop apps. Our tasksverge toward a common logic:living filaments of root, of interface. Ralph Earlejoined 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 coauthoredEnterprise Computing with Objects: From Client/Server Environments to the Internetfor Addison-Wesley’s Bloch-Jacobson-Rumbaugh Object Technology Series, and he published articles in technical journals, includingIEEE 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 areEverything You Love Is New(Redhawk Publications, 2024) andThe 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, includingThe Sun,Carolina Quarterly, andSufi Journal.