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?
Credit

Copyright © 2011 by Elaine Equi. Reprinted from Click and Clone with the permission of Coffee House Press.