Bookmarks and Headstones

My shelves lift volumes covered soft and hard,
a thousand books I’ve given brief regard.
Slower gazing reveals the multitude
all clasping slender markers that protrude
like flowers lazing where the reading paused
and then expired when the flow was lost.

Like them my body is a flower clasped
between the fast-read chapters of my past
and all my future pages still untold.
After each day’s loud narration, my soul
retreats to some hidden library room
while body marks where story should resume.

The vast hillside lawn has horizontal
shelves of tightly shouldered bookmarks, some tall
some short, but all denoting interrupt-
ted narratives of people who have upped
and stuck a headstone where life was leading,
and where visitors may resume reading.

Grand Little Things , 05 February 2025.

Notes: The lines are all decasyllabic. There is intentional echoing of sounds beyond the end rhymes; for example, “slower gazing” with “flowers lazing” and with “flow was lost”. I had fun rhyming “interrupt-/ ted” with “upped/ and”. The metaphors – body as bookmark and headstone as bookmark – still affect me even after reflection, and I hope they may work for you too.

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