Books, for dVerse Poets Open Link Night

17 Replies

Books

The fresh bookstore smell of them,
bending the pages to crack the spine,
notes scribbled in the margins,
underlines,
hearts with initials on the flyleaf,
something to loan or to wrap for a gift,
something propped up on the bathtub edge,
it’s paper sprinkled with drops–
pages wrinkled into a Braille memory–
that rainstorm run through.
How he put it in his back pocket.

Poetry touched by fingers.
Single words met by lips.
Words pored over by candlelight or flashlight
in a sleeping bag or in a hut with no electricity.
Books pushed into backpacks
and under table legs for leveling.

Paper that soaked up
the oil from fingers
of the reader
consuming popcorn
or chocolate chip cookies
in lieu of the romance on the pages–
finger food served with brain food.

Passions wrapped in paper and ink–
the allure of a book and its tactile comfort.
The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend.

Books are the gravestones of trees
but also the journals of our hearts.
Cities of words,
boards and bricks of letters,
insulated by hard covers or the curling skins
of paperbacks.
Something solid to transfer the dreams
of one person to another in a concrete telepathy
of fingers and eyes.
Books are the roads we build between us,
solid and substantial–
their paper the roadbed,
the words the center lines directing us

What will fill the bookcases of a modern world?
Google replacing dictionaries,
Wikipedia already an invisible bank of Encyclopaedia Britannicas.
What will we use our boards and bricks for,
if not to hold up whole tenements of books?
How will we furnish our walls?
What will boys carry to school for girls?
What will we balance on heads
to practice walking with perfect posture?
What will we throw in the direction of the horrible pun?

Will there be graveyards for books, or cities built of them?
Quaint materials for easy chairs or headboards for beds?
Will we hollow them out for cigar boxes
or grind them up for packing material?
Where do books belong in the era of Kindle and Audible?
These dinosaurs that soon will not produce more eggs––
 perhaps they’ll grow as precious as antiques.
The grandchildren of our grandchildren
will ponder how to open them. Will wonder at their quaintness,
collecting them like mustache cups or carnival glass,
wondering about the use of them–as unfathomable as hieroglyphics.
That last book closing its pages––one more obsolete mystery
fueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanished
into a wireless universe.

For the dVerse Poets Open Link Night

And….Here is a link to another poem published today: “BEGINNING”

To see how others responded to the prompt go HERE.

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About lifelessons

My blog, which started out to be about overcoming grief, quickly grew into a blog about celebrating life. I post daily: poems, photographs, essays or stories. I've lived in countries all around the globe but have finally come to rest in Mexico, where I've lived since 2001. My books may be found on Amazon in Kindle and print format, my art in local Ajijic galleries. Hope to see you at my blog.

17 thoughts on “Books, for dVerse Poets Open Link Night”

  6. kim881's avatarkim881

    I love, love, love your ode to books, Judy, that you included the notes scribbled in the margins and underlines, all the touching with fingers, and the books under table legs and in a back pocket! I especially love these lines:

    ‘Passions wrapped in paper and ink–the allure of a book and its tactile comfort.The soul of a book you could touch, fold, bend’

    And these lines made me sad:

    ‘That last book closing its pages––one more obsolete mysteryfueling the curiosity of a bygone era that has vanishedinto a wireless universe.’

    Like

    Reply ↓

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