Ode to Scribes Books, Now Demolished
There are books pulped for recycled paper,
but what's that caper worth to a lease-holder,
cast forth on a further shore like a Jonah,
spewed out of a second-hand-book store?
You call yourself an author, what for?
A sack of manuscript in bits to lend
to eyeballs not all that interested, actually.
What to do with books, those gummy codgers,
bound for the cemetery, where no-one waits
with bated breath for some ceremony
that might trigger a trip through old stacks,
deliver a lollapalooza like Joe Palooka,
and a creak of leather cover slapped open
to chapter and verse promising worse
for any store-front that hosts cheap books?
I'm here to talk about late reflections
on books that own you, books that know you,
books you dream of, books that dream you.
Pricey books that are a glossy nothing-burger,
at the big end, when uploaded to the web,
as if everybody owned something precious once.
You pretend to read me, I pretend to
know readers who prefer to read you,
though printed books they say are on their way out,
except The Great Gatsby in spats and white sports coat.
Philip K. Dick, H. P. Lovecraft, I found in Scribes,
yes, Shirley Jackson had all the action at times,
and there's something still about Marcel Proust,
the great unreadable demanding to be read.
But forward to victory over the printed word,
the muse who lives in a dream, like a waterbird.
Nothing but the Cloud now can feed freed minds.
For every perishing Kiwi bookworm in the rain,
there's another digital native born on the back lawn.
Books that were forbidden, difficult to obtain,
are seen as a brain drain or dusty and quaint,
and our phones anyway can read them for us.
The unforgiving minute will be towed and fined.
Let sixty-two Cuban missile heels spin the wheels
of jeepsters who toss pages into the wind-turbine.
You don't need a book to go with vaping and posing.
It all comes down to karma and laughter in the dark,
as another book store is bowled for another carpark.
David Eggleton lives in Ōtepoti Dunedin and was the Aotearoa New Zealand Poet Laureate between August 2019 and August 2022. He is a former Editor of Landfall and Landfall Review Online as well as the Phantom Billstickers Cafe Reader. His The Wilder Years: Selected Poems, was published by Otago University Press in 2021 and his latest collection Respirator: A Laureate Collection 2019 -2022 was published by Otago University Press in March 2023. He is a co-editor of Katūīvei: Contemporary Pasifika Poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, published by Massey University Press in 2024.
