Those pheromone for stirring love,
the scent of reading drift to sink,
recycled letters, verbs for words,
all taken, tumbling down to earth
when they prescribed to raise our thoughts.
I have a dream, texts in a spin,
that letters may escape therein,
those glyphs find partners, hieroglyphs,
instead of shred, together paste,
and peace emerge from pieces strewn.
Between words, stuffed, and crushed, then pulped –
a fiction claimed – from dream awake.
Misled by cover story blurb,
we’ve witnessed flames from piled-high books,
we’ve heard or witnessed high school bans,
exclusions from permitted lists,
like wallow ships, low, swallow sea;
of classless girls and danger reads,
the knowledge vortex primed to feed
the underground where volumes speak,
but that’s no fiction, scattered leaves.
Stephen Kingsnorth (Cambridge M.A., English & Religious Studies), retired to Wales from ministry in the Methodist Church due to Parkinson’s Disease, has had pieces published by on-line poetry sites, printed journals and anthologies, including Poetry Potion.
His blog is at https://poetrykingsnorth.wordpress.com/