They are old soldiers home from the
war,
spines
cracked and broken,
aching
from the weight of life
and
stories that beg to be told.
The
pages are yellow, like the teeth
of
men who have seen a century crawl
on
its knees from birth to fragility.
Memories
are stored along the bones,
thread
stitching together the decades.
Dog
ears measure first love, innocent kisses,
the
time by the stream in the woods
when
clothes were shed with abandon
and
the opposite sex was a game
of
flirtation and near misses.
Some
rose early in the blue morning
for
a factory with a stack,
an
office with a clock
with
only a nine and five on its face.
There’s
a bookmarker here and there
whispering
“I simply can’t go on right now,
but
maybe later, maybe later.”
Dust
on the covers and the tops of the pages
seems
to anticipate death,
and
yet they live on, their minds intact
and
ready to quote a poem or tale
of
this day or that,
of
how cleansing the rain was
or
how the land was sunny and flat.
They
have been consigned to retirement,
yearning
like Ulysses for years—more years—
and
yet these old men with vellum souls,
their
thoughts as precise as ink,
seem
to ponder, word by word
and
line by line, the real possibility
that
they are destined for immortality.
~William Hammett
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