Ode to Latency

Between the click and the response,
A universe of hops and wants,
Through copper veins and fiber light,
Your packet travels through the night.

The DNS resolves your name,
Three hops through servers, all the same,
The TLS handshake trades its keys,
While milliseconds pile like fees.

The load balancer picks a node,
The database unlocks its road,
A query plan unfolds its wings,
And indexes do wonderful things.

The JSON wraps the answer tight,
Gzipped and sent at speed of light,
Back through the routers, switches, peers,
Arriving in two hundred milliseconds — or tears.

For users count in blinks, not clocks,
And every second spent just mocks
The engineering underneath,
That hides its effort like a sheath.
