Thursday, May 06, 2021

The Flight Of The Libraries

(for Ray Bradbury)

if you came back today, a week from now, say
some golden morning before the dandelion fluff wears off
with the Sun still making taffied Light in the arboretums:
would you watch with us who await in the white dawn
the improbable sorrowful flight of the libraries?
for we need the apple comfort of all you meant in order to bear
this lift off of all the rarities. the secret files and piles on piles of

discarded classics no longer branded "relevant." my heart is rent;
they scoff in the May air
at anything I have to say of the fairest of the fair but I'm telling you that I was
there when it happened.
I dreamt a dream one day I stood on the crest the farthest crest
in town and saw them lifting off the ground like pirate ships
with a vast treasure, whirling and swirling like in a water tank
an experiment gone wrong from Mr. Wizard to show the children how tornados form
there they were bricks and mortar with their worlds on worlds soaring a little awkwardly
rickety above the fairgrounds
rackety by the abandoned railroad tracks the smokestacks
recalled by Heaven since no one used them for books anymore just for multipurpose
anything else though once they gleamed from shelf to shelf
like Great Grandma's sugar bowl when Maeterlinck's Sugar personified dropped by it makes me want to

cry;Goodbye to the books the ghosts of Chistmas last; we all got strange looks asking for

Robinson Crusoe just last Tuesday for Heidi with her flower wreathed goats
soon they will be gone mere motes in the sunlight we shall be bees no longer making honey;
like some of the characters in your stories
we shall have to rely on memory alone
remembering how it felt to let the lilacs go
when the snows came and the ice witch poems.
mary angela douglas 6 may 2021





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