Reasons to resist library closures

I keep hearing more news about library closures or libraries having to cut their opening hours/staff/stock/costs/losses. Arrgggh.

I wrote this poem a couple of years back. I wonder whether, in ten or twenty years' time, some of the images in it will seem archaic and quaint, like something from a previous era.

Towards the exit

I find a book on Shakespeare’s life, misplaced

in the Cookery section.  No worries.

Here’s a blue corner chair, a vase

of optimistic daffodils on a windowsill

and an hour to laze through glossed pages.

A woman with a stick and a wheeze tugs

herself up the ramp to Fiction.  She smiles

to find new romance in ‘Recently Returned’.

She leans against a pillar for the first pages

in which Marion flies to Morocco with a sad heart.

A young man, tall, unshaven, taps

his dreams into an online form. He bends

towards the screen as if in prayer

to a fickle deity, scrolling up and down

for errors, for slips, for what he's missed.

A child in denim dungarees perches

on the chair opposite me.  The mother

browses the shelves while his fat fingers

trace a dragon’s tail across the page.

He points out green and blue and mouth fire.

Two men, both in sturdy boots, shed

mud in ‘Crime’ while swapping views on

Rankin -

- The library will close in five minutes -

Clutching Shakespeare and Marion

in Morocco and dreams and dragons

and a Rebus mystery (and a leaflet on cuts

from a table near the door)

we all sigh towards the exit.

 

We mustn't Lego of our libraries