Sunday, July 26, 2020

Book Shops Offer Us Civilizations - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Book Shops Offer Us Civilizations

Book shops offer us civilizations
Democracies of the living and the dead -
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes,
     and you
Over cups of coffee wrangle meter and rhyme

Book shops offer us civilizations

James Weldon Johnson, Keats, and Claude McKay
Are questioning Auden along Aisle 3
Yevtushenko scoffs at bureaucracy
Ahkmatova Stray Dogs the lot of us

Book shops offer us civilizations

And only an unhappy man who has lost his way
Obsesses on the bookseller’s DNA

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