reading, reading, all the time: love, adventure, hope, and crime, worlds of fantasy, and words flying out like flocks of birds past us, through us, in us, out us, past and present all about us, yes i know it's late, it's true: sure, though, here's one more for you
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
As a little girl
She was told that one day
When she was much older and retired
She would have time to read
All the time she wanted
But she reckoned
That even if she started young
And read all the time
And lived to be old
It wouldn’t be enough time
But she tried it anyway
And read as a girl on nights she felt scared
And read as a young woman to feel and to grow
She read as a mother to her young children
And continued to find both new and old books to read
She was never confined in reading
Never yelled at
Never told she wasn’t good enough
Never felt inadequate
Always just immersed
And now her children’s children are having children
And still she reads
As they all read
Somehow she passed on this solitary activity
To those she loves and who love her
Reading is not “easy”
But nothing in life that matters
Ever is
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
I see the vistas of your mind
as carried through your words;
the colors of your feelings,
ever-changing –
The way you restlessly explore
each strange and new adventure;
the many places that your heart
is ranging —
And what this is, is hard to know:
your vision, planted in my mind,
a place, I’ll never, ever go,
but can see, nonetheless
Your mind is ever altering,
responding and transforming,
and my own thoughts and feelings
rearranging
Hours reading in my room
Far away I’ve traveled
Many palaces I’ve seen
Mysteries unraveled
Magic magnifying glass
New adventure calls
I have everything I need
Here within
These walls
Reading is like running –
Only for those
Who would know the elation
Of going the entire
Distance
