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