The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
I love books. I love libraries. I’ve always dreamed of having my own personal library, with four walls of books, shelves so high you need a ladder to read the top shelves. We spent hours in our local public library when I was a child. I’d sit myself down surrounded with tens of books and check out as many as I could. I loved losing myself in the shelves. I love the smell of books, the joy of buying a brand-new book, or checking one out from the library, bringing it home to read, and curling up on the sofa with a blanket for the evening. But there is nothing quite like finding a used book that you’ve always wanted, one that wears the history of all of its owners.
This week’s poem celebrates the used book.
Used Book The book calls to other books guided by its voice, I bought one with rain on its cover. A tanka by Hiroshima Yoshikawa
Droplets of rain stain the cover like the rings revealed when a tree is cut down This tree these pages this book where I find on the fifth page a coffee stain What will this book tell me of you, its past reader? A student at a café Or in the library sneaking coffee in to stave off sleep A woman reading one last page before rushing off to work A man missing his bus stop to finish a chapter Will I find notes in its margins underlined sentences starred passages dog-eared pages to return to? What will this book tell me of myself?
I wanted to write something connected to libraries, and I rediscovered this poem in one of those folders of discarded poems, and just like the used book, I decided this one deserved to be read by someone other than me and my poetry group.
I would like to recommend a couple of the SmallStack posts on libraries. I especially loved this one from
Summer Reading and ’s Checking Out. You can read many more at the Seed pod library thread.
This tree
these pages
this book
What a gorgeous wordy staircase.
Thanks, LeeAnn. Such a wonderful poem. And I love finding things in old books. I recently borrowed a really ancient one from a local library that contained several pressed leaves. There’s a poem/story there. ✨