A Book's Confession

In silence,
between writer and reader,
a memory of words and hands takes form.

We learn substance and worth
through others' eyes.
Cloth, flesh, ink, paper, dust.
These are but material forms
in which ideas dwell.

In the roar of a crowded shelf of books,
desert sun and arctic night,
distant seas of thought awaken,
mingle, and are still.

Minds meet where the reading hand
grasps the void and inks
its passage in empty margins.

Lost, forgotten, thumbed, split.
We bear the scars of patient decades'
and centuries' dreams.

Whose hands will hold me I do not know.
The book, too, reads its readers in real time.

— Anonymous