Poetry for Engineers: Of Code and Shortleaf Pine

Poetry for Engineers: Of Code and Shortleaf Pine

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25 Oct 2026

1 min read

After retiring from IBM as a senior software engineer in 2017, Ralph Earle has published two poetry collections.

Nicole Millman

I step into the warm moist air
among the columns of the pines,
their net of twigs and roots
complex 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 tasks
verge toward a common logic:
living filaments of root, of interface.

Ralph Earle

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.

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