The Libraries Didn't Burn by Elaine Equi | Poemist

Elaine Equi

1953 / Oak Park, Illinois

The Libraries Didn't Burn

despite books kindled in electronic flames.

The locket of bookish love
still opens and shuts.

But its words have migrated
to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —
a somewhere in between.

Then will oak, willow,
birch, and olive poets return
to their digital tribes —

trees wander back to the forest?
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