Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings….Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe.
Speak to me. Say something
about a child buried in a book
as if she were a reading doll.
Tell me you know the secret
of how a book takes a child
for its own, captures its heart
as if the two were one,
child and book a single pulse.
Books are patient places,
care-take early buried children,
ease them out of misconceptions,
urge person-speech upon them,
a sense for the pithy quote.
When a child is nurtured so,
words root. Fed well, they bud,
bloom into a book person.
Bookland is enchantment,
a beguiling of word-flowers
leading to consciousness,
human stories, blue skies,
flowing words, vortices
canopied by rainbows
arcing over enbookment:
personhood of elsewhere
Be gentle with such a one
so soon caught by the page
and its witcheries,
no pause allowed between
what-to-do or what-to-be.
Time? Gone to bookland
which transfixes persons
in word enchantment.
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