January 2016
Ed Werstein
wersted@gmail.com
wersted@gmail.com
Despite being a life-long consumer of poetry, I spent 22 years in manufacturing before my muse awoke and dragged herself out of bed. I sympathize with poor and working people and I advocate for peace and against corporate power. My poetry has appeared in Verse Wisconsin, Blue Collar Review, Stoneboat and a few other publications. My first chapbook, Who Are We Then?, was published in 2013 by Partisan Press. You can find more of my poetry and other great poetry here: http://littleeaglereverse.blogspot.com/
Spineless Thief
The dictionary you deliver
weighs exactly one pound
bound in hard gray plastic,
pageless.
I request War and Peace and get
the same gray shell,
the same one-pound weight.
The Grapes of Wrath,
The Encyclopedia of Baseball,
The Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda,
I’m finding each without
variation in binding
weight or size.
You invite me to pick up
all five volumes at the same time
and amazingly, together
they remain unchanged,
still pageless.
I hate you!
You spineless thief
of the tactile pleasures of my reading.
You hard-shelled, shelfless library.
Will I need to use
my real books for kindling
in your cold world?
Wild
I once had a wild dictionary
beyond any purpose
but its own.
It would not be a stepstool
refused to function as a press
for wildflowers
would not weigh down
loose papers
stand up
under a plant
or boost a child
to table height.
It was a dictionary
after all.
A Kindle tamed
my beautiful wild
dictionary
saddled it with those
unnatural chores.
The dictionary you deliver
weighs exactly one pound
bound in hard gray plastic,
pageless.
I request War and Peace and get
the same gray shell,
the same one-pound weight.
The Grapes of Wrath,
The Encyclopedia of Baseball,
The Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda,
I’m finding each without
variation in binding
weight or size.
You invite me to pick up
all five volumes at the same time
and amazingly, together
they remain unchanged,
still pageless.
I hate you!
You spineless thief
of the tactile pleasures of my reading.
You hard-shelled, shelfless library.
Will I need to use
my real books for kindling
in your cold world?
Wild
I once had a wild dictionary
beyond any purpose
but its own.
It would not be a stepstool
refused to function as a press
for wildflowers
would not weigh down
loose papers
stand up
under a plant
or boost a child
to table height.
It was a dictionary
after all.
A Kindle tamed
my beautiful wild
dictionary
saddled it with those
unnatural chores.
©2016 Ed Werstein