Friday, April 19, 2013

Poetry Friday


Here's Billy Collins on one of my favorite subjects, books:

Books
by Billy Collins

From the heart of this dark, evacuated campus
I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit, alphabetical shelves,
Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low, gigantic chord of language.

I picture a figure in the act of reading,
shoes on a desk, head tilted into the wind of a book,
a man in two worlds, holding the rope of his tie
as the suicide of lovers saturates a page,
or lighting a cigarette in the middle of a theorem.
He moves from paragraph to paragraph
...
(Read the rest here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Find the Poetry Friday round up today at Live Your Poem.

3 comments:

Andromeda Jazmon said...

Good Lord Deliver Us! Those last two stanzas are breathtaking.

"I see all of us reading ourselves away from ourselves,
straining in circles of light to find more light..."

sigh.

Irene Latham said...

line of words becomes trail of crumbs... yes! Thank you, Karen.

Mary Lee said...

Ooh! That's a keeper. (And perhaps a Billy Collins I've never read? How can that be?)

Love this: "head tilted into the wind of a book"

Thank you thank you thank you!!!