Old Books

Ode to those beautiful bunches of pages,

    whose words, tales, stories document the ages.

Love of the musty smell, the library memory invites,

    cracking open a new book, bliss in its own right.

Doubtless hours of pleasure derived from entering 

    one's own world to dance with the author visiting.

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Burgess bumbling as Bemis, bearing bottles of Coke on his face,  

     he'd have read until he died, happily alone, if those glasses didn't break.   

Olfactorily speaking, it's the capricious compounds emitted, 

     as the leaves etched with natural pigments deteriorated.      

Opuses of Dante, Dostoyevsky, Camus, Ellison, Atwood, Orwell, and Silko, to name a few, 

     could be snagged for a pittance at the book sale in the local library's extracurricular room.      

Knowledge digested through a four-part immersion, comes to the happily engaged,

     from comprehension to absorption, cogitation and enlightenment: the development of the sage.    

Sumerians commenced, carving cuneiform into clay tablets with reeds,

     And as over 5,200 years have passed, we've resorted to candles that smell like old books and libraries, 

     but no one has yet invented scratch n' sniff screens.