I posted the poem “Futility” from Macedonian Ante Popovski before. It springs to mind now because I was thinking about pens. But, as Popovski notes, “you cannot write on your soul with a pen…”

While I could not immediately conjure up another poem specifically referencing a pen/pens, I could, of course, count on Adam Zagajewski to supply one filled with “small objects” and citing “illegible script”. We can imagine the pen and its ink, intimate, singular and aged.

Small Objects
-Adam Zagajewski
My contemporaries like small objects,
dried starfish that have forgotten the sea,
melancholy stopped clocks, postcards
sent from vanished cities,
and blackened with illegible script,
in which they discern words
like “yearning,” “illness,” or “the end.”
They marvel at dormant volcanoes.
They don’t desire light.