"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."
Others might be like me
Maybe I can be a leader;
Confessing I was weekly hooked
By (yes) the Weekly Reader.
I was only six years old
Not knowing that succeeding
My young life then was bound to be
A lifetime full of reading.
Every week we’d read about
A galaxy expanding
We read ourselves to rocketships
And on the first moon landing.
The Reader faded as we grew
And we turned other pages new
But learned within those books we’d share
That words could take us anywhere.
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
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
One might not even notice her…
She does what she must do,
And is a loving, loyal friend;
She takes care of her family,
And toils without end
To keep all of them healthy,
And to bring joy to each day;
She strives to be creative, and
She often finds a way
There is a place, though, that she goes
When she needs to reboot:
One might not even notice her,
So hidden and so mute
But there, her laden mind takes rest
Inside each turning page;
A place she’s so engrossed that she
At last can
Disengage
Reading is like running –
Only for those
Who would know the elation
Of going the entire
Distance
