Poetry Day - Old Libraries
I’ve spent the day quite entirely by myself today, not speaking to anyone except people at checkouts up the road (my flatmate has stayed out at her parents place in the suburbs, which she often does on weekends). You know how it is sometimes, when you had asked someone if they want to catch up, they don’t get back to you, and when you realise they aren’t going to get back to you (and you should maybe take a hint and quit asking), you don’t have the time (or maybe the energy or enthusiasm) to find anyone else to do something with. So I have wandered my local strip, browsed second-hand books and thrift stores, sat in a café with a book because “we read to know we are not alone” (CS Lewis), pottered around at home.
I quite enjoy those things, mostly, and I like a weekend with some of them in it. But the last week was rather discouraging, and I did have moments of misery and took it upon myself to ask God why my life is such a mess. I didn’t actually get an answer to that (except the one inside my head telling me it’s because I've messed it up), but I did then read this encouraging post, once again an excerpt from Jerry Bridges’ Trusting God Even When Life Hurts. (I thought I owned that book and might have even read it years ago, but it turns out I have The Joy of Fearing God instead, so I am going to get it soon.)
I have my doubts that writing blog posts when you haven’t spoken to anyone in real life all day is a good idea. That might not be good for either of us. So I thought I’d post a poem, in praise of libraries and second-hand book stores. (I found and bought an old biography of portraits on the life and work of Francis Schaeffer today, published the year after his death, which looks good!)
Old Libraries
Shelved quietly out of sight and mind,
The dog-eared, the foxed, the uncut, unread,
The sagging, slipped, asleep, inclined
On the shoulders of stiff volumes no one reads.
Pressed between their pages, wedding flowers,
Fingerprints, last will and testament,
Letters of longing, love, condolence,
A final note before the long descent
From a bridge over black water
Far from home in someone else’s town.
And maybe once the scarcely legible lines
Of longhand like veins on the crumpled wings
Of the emerging moth, a lost sonnet soars
On one unfolded wing to the world’s applause.
Gillian Clarke (National Poet of Wales)
P.S. I’m 236 pages into The Brothers Karamazov, but it’s 985 pages, so I’m just getting started really.