frigates that take us lands away

^{After Emily Dickinson’s “There is no Frigate like a Book”}

the small begin of i
in to look 
                       up
all the way
                       up 
the wall of 
books that break 
the heart of a 
child open to love   
who does not yet
know desire except 
when she desires 
cathedrals of words that gather 
dust
await the eye 
—to see was to love—
hungered on hunger 
sweeping across a paginated world
perfected 
in misery in
love in words spent with 
books and time
algorithms of the
ever in spirit 
the extended minute 
stretched to 
goodbye to 
leaved portals
                       to
the worlds 
of other to

forever. 

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“I fell in love with books as a very young child, when my mother took me to a library for the very first time. The towering stacks—cathedrals of books—filled me with awe and astonishment. I sensed their magic—these frigates, as Emily Dickinson describes them, with their ability to take us away, to places unseen and unknown; to new ideas; to different cultures. The poem becomes its own frigate and suggests that we are all moving inexorably towards something or somewhere else, even if only within ourselves. Perhaps, in the words of Dickinson, to our own ‘Human Soul.’”
—M. NourbeSe Philip