The faint vanilla smell of a library
Running fingers lightly over the tops of books
Looking at titles and covers
Hoping to fall in love
A purple cover and an arresting title
Pulled off the shelf, the first page read
Then pages start turning as fast as eyes can read
Soon unaware of anything, except the story
And a boy reading in the library
Unites the generations
Travels time and space
And expands his own mind
While sitting quietly on the floor
A library seems random
Unless it is your own:
The taken paths to get those books,
Haphazard and unknown.
Enthusiasms come and go,
We swim in different waters;
At times we nearly (almost) drown,
And others, splash like otters —
We find ourselves, or find that we
Are not quite who we thought;
Or lose ourselves, entranced in tales
Exactly as we sought —
In word and story, rhyme and tale,
In tension or in languor,
The thrill of lives we’ll never know,
The taste of love, or anger,
Or learning: these, our lives, or hopes,
Our early dreams begotten,
That stir within us in our sleep,
Like echoes, unforgotten.
But though the senses fade with time,
They don’t need much reminding
To thrill to that familiar type —
The scent of old cracked binding —
For what you’ve read is who you’ve been,
The library assembler —
And it’s still there for you, for me,
If we would just
Remember
It was because of a place like this
From the slums my mom escaped;
And ’cause I hid in a place like this
My early teens were shaped
‘Twas from stories hidden in shelves like these
That my heart found it’s release:
Libraries may soon be a thing of the past
But to me, they always will be… peace
