Inspiration of Reading

Reading and Books

The inspiration of reading and the books we read is close to my heart. Here is a poem that expresses some of what I feel:

FOLIOS FOUND

You speak to me from your wall of silence
And the world you create for me is real.
I hear your words and the sense
I use lets me see what I cannot feel.

Entombed in this world of my fathers,
I find freedom in folios found
On the walls of my study, where matters
of the day have lost their sound.

Stories of great deeds and magic become
a source of delight. They lift me
into realms of dreams -- drawn from
Remembered sensations of each day as real.

The beauty pressed within your marbled
Endpapers lasts further than I can see.
Only when I dream of tomorrow do fabled
Lives become possibilities for me.

These dreams are what carry my life
Beyond each mundane demand and care.
Chronicles of summers spent in strife
Fade beneath the eternal truth you bear.

The wall still stands -- even in silence
Like the sphinx stood before the ancients who knew
It brings to us words with the power to enchant.
When we hear these words we make them our own.

From Preludes of the Mind, January 1993, James Henderson