Poetry Friday - Used Bookstore

           Thanks to Christie Wyman who is hosting this Poetry Friday, at her blog, Wondering and Wandering, here. Take a look at "Community Poem Part 2 when you visit, full of all the ways poetry "is"! 

A small peek!

         Many poetry books are donated at the used bookstore where I work. I wish I could make them available to each of you! I do bring some home to read but there are too, too many for me to bring them all.

         However, sometimes when I glance through one, a poem grabs me, and that's what happened this past week when my noiseless entourage by Charles Simic came through in a bag of donations. Inside, among many others loved, is a poem about a Used Bookstore. I can't find it online but will share a few lines & use it as a mentor text for my own poem about MY bookstore.

           Used Bookstore - Simic

Lovers hold hands in never-opened novels.

The page with a recipe for cucumber soup is missing.

A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm,

of writing in a balloon over Lake Erie.

                   two other verses complete his poem

            This 50-Year-Old Bookstore

Started by a group of women declaring that

more books were needed in the neighborhood.

They rented a room in the library and started

offering books at two dollars per, one for kids' books.

It grows into its own musty place, a bakery before, now housing sweet words

instead of pastries and cakes. Here's a display within a glass case,

no longer keeping flies away, but luring another kind of taste. 

Kids' books sit low, a tangle of board books and early readers

while a gang of mature stories keeps an ABC order until browsers

break up the group, take home some Cleary, DiCamillo, and Riordans.

The stories remain loved even with worn bindings.

Wander up steep stairs to the mysteries, many spilling off shelves

into a bounty of boxes. Mystery readers love them, yet keep

only long enough to read them, then trade for more.

Visitors who know the store stride to favorite sections.

They may wish a new (used) fiction to meet new people

or a memoir of a hero that inspires living one's life for good. 

All for the coming trip, beach reads, or for a bedroom nook!

Different kinds of pain keep the health and religion shelves rather empty.   

Yet, sometimes a new donation appears to mean someone has found remedies 

and wants to pass them along.

Can you tell my imagination jogs along with the books, watching which leave 

quickly and which ones cry out for only a peek? 

"Open me!" is on the binding if only you look close enough. 

 Linda Baie ©