NaPoWriMo’s assignment for today was to find a word in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows and to use it to prompt a poem. I chose the word “vellichor.” Here is its definition:
n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Since I wrote a poem about vellichor just two months ago, I’m reblogging it here.

Heart’s Eye

Who can pass a bookstore door
and fail to note the vellichor
or fail to feel within their heart
the message of a piece of art?
A  poignant poem or pithy quote,
well-loved and thereby learned by rote,
is a means by which we might denote
that part of us that we devote
to what we can’t repudiate—
that part of us that is a gate 
to a special way of seeing—
the heart’s eye of a human being.

Here is the link to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows.

Here is the link to today’s NaPoWriMo’s prompt.