Cull Ex Libris

They are culling entire libraries.

The landfill is encyclopedic,

A humus thick with sentences,

A decaying marl of chapter and verse.

They are purging large imaginations,

A universe of arcane equations,

Giant stands of hard philosophy,

Piling up in the moon-dazzled fens,

Turning tomes of theology to sudd,

Small quatrains floating like debris,

Poetry drowning in the viscous mud,

Dewey’s decimals deconstructed.

They are tearing pages from spines,

Dust-jackets wind-gusted like leaves,

A detritus of indexes in the gullies.

The night sky is as black as ink,

Chronicles of days numbered like pages,

Acknowledgements bleaching in the sun,

Confirming the death of the author,

A lament and legacy for the ages.

Prefaces are stacked in deep shadows,

Afterwords lingering like memory,

Facts and themes bulldozed as rubble.

They are culling entire libraries.

Rod Moran