Words...like sand on a beach

How many of the bestselling books today will even be a memory 100 years from now? So much is written, and so little worth hearing is said. It hasn't always been this way. Centuries ago, tales were told mainly in the oral tradition. The masses were illiterate (and although many are today, most people have at least some functional literacy). They could remember the tales told and sung to them; and passed them on. Once the mass production of books began, people thought they could keep the wisdom stored between the pages, and not in their minds and hearts.

The Sentence

Here I mark my words.
I condemn them to neglect.
I sentence them to exile
in the land of forgotten texts
     FOR LIFE!

Though they exist here
    among the dusty tomes
    of fragile leaves
they are only corpses of ink
doomed to eternal rest.

No angel, no demon
shall ever raise the dead
syllables mashed beneath white sheets
bleeding ideas
onto unthinking shelves.

They turn to dust
joining dust
in musky attics
or sink beneath
their fathers and brothers
in library vaults
and rare book stores.

"you must have them here.
It's why you exist!”

Sweaty clerks
and librarians
wipe their glasses clean:
          "Who again?
          I don't understand you."

"In the dawn
when dreams disown me…"

With narrow eyes,
trembling hands,
shaking heads:
          "No.
          You must have dreamed those words.”

                 ©1990 B. Vincent Hernandez