}} Elegy to the Bookcase |

Poetry at Sangam

SangamHouse

 










Elegy to the Bookcase

At least 11 people have been found in a tiny dark room, a jail cell, hidden behind a bookcase in a Philippine police station. —BBC News, April 27, 2017

 
The cheap ones, those whose shelves bent
Or cracked in the middle under the weight
Of their books, we had a lot of those. Got rid
With a clean conscience when they’d outlived
Their use, but still we mourned, not as much
As if they had been the books themselves,
We’d have been inconsolable otherwise,
But they’re related, books and the bookcases
They’re in, practically twinned by DNA
Of pulp, fiberboard, cellulose — one cheap,
The other priceless, but never mind this gulf
In value: When we take an old battered bookcase
Down to the dumpster, we feel a pang.
Goodbye to a cousin of better cousins.

Pine bookcases, once we could afford wood,
Never bend and are so pretty. Make smart books
Look even smarter. But they get scarred
And scratched, burned by a careless votive candle,
And after one extremely wet summer, turn moldy.
But dump them? We couldn’t. So take the books out
One by one, scrub the shelves, bleach out the mold,
Sand down the scars, finish with Murphy’s Oil Soap
Till they’re pretty again. But we sort of miss
The funeral march to the dumpster. Cheap
Is so easy to trash, and the expensive stuff
Too much trouble to keep, but that’s how we roll.
If you’re of little value, you’re expendable;
If you’re solid and shiny and smart, you’re safe.

The bookcase that’s supposed to open to
Imagined worlds just opened up to a prison cell,
And the human rights inspector expecting
Harry Potter books found Azkaban instead.
Eleven poor suspects who couldn’t afford bail
Crammed into a dungeon that couldn’t fit all
So they slept standing up with hardly room
To snore. True, it’s a misery replicated
In virtually every lockup in this country,
So it’s nothing unique. All those cheap lives,
Not even dead yet, coffined upright
In their sleep. So this elegy can’t really
Be for them. We grieve for the bookcase
Because the bookcase, as we know it, is dead.