Behind a library shelf…

1.

You breathe in earthy, musty, woody redolence
of paper, inky words, dreams,
the comforting scents
of stories, poetry from past ages,
paper that was born in reams
and cut neatly into pages.

2.

You touch surfaces caressed by other fingers,
pristine, dog-eared, annotated,
abused, their colours:
white, yellow, dessicated;
the satisfying sussurus
as you turn each page over.

3.

You peruse crisp, fresh print or smudged
seventies boldie, slab, bookman, old style,
which other readers have misjudged,
passed over and, all the while,
you and these tomes have become one,
fused by your anticipation.

Kim M Russell, 20^th April 2025

It’s 20th April, and only ten more days of NaPoWriMo. Today’s resource is the online galleries of the Tate Modern, and the optional prompt is based on Theodore Roethke’s poem, ‘In Evening Air’, a weird one, with a strange rhythm, off-rhymes, and odd language. Maureen says, “Despite – or maybe because – of this, it has a hypnotic quality, as if it were all inevitable.”

Our challenge is, with this poem in mind, to write poems informed by musical phrasing or melody that employ some form of sound play (rhyme, meter, assonance, alliteration).

As I’ll be out all day, I took the short cut of reworking another old poem.