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.
Copyright © 2023 by M. NourbeSe Philip. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 31, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“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
M. NourbeSe Philip
