Because all of us enjoy reading and love books of all kinds, I thought this poem was highly appropriate: From Haki R. Madhubuti:
So Many Books, So Little Time For independent booksellers & librarians, especially Nichelle Hayes Frequently during my mornings of pain & reflection when I can’t write or articulate my thoughts or locate the mindmusic needed to complete the poems & essays that are weeks plus days overdue forcing me to stop, I cease answering my phone, eating right, running my miles, reading my mail, and making love. (Also, this is when my children do not seek me out because I do not seek them out.) I escape north, to the nearest library or used bookstore. They are my retreats, my quiet energy-givers, my intellectual refuge. For me it is not bluewater beaches, theme parks, or silent chapels hidden among forest greens. Not multi-stored American malls, corporate book supermarkets, mountain trails, or Caribbean hideaways. My sanctuaries are liberated lighthouses of shelved books, featuring forgotten poets, unread anthropologists of tenure- seeking assistant professors, self-published geniuses, remaindered first novelists, highlighting speed-written bestsellers, wise historians & theologians, nobel, pulitzer prize, and american book award winners, poets & fiction writers, overcertain political commentators, small press wunderkinds & learned academics. All are vitamins for my slow brain & sidetracked spirit in this winter of creating. I do not believe in smiling politicians, AMA doctors, zebra-faced bankers, red-jacketed real estate or automobile salespeople, or singing preachers. I believe in books. It can be conveniently argued that knowledge, not that which is condensed or computer packaged, but pages of hard-fought words, dancing language meticulously & contemplatively written by the likes of me & others, shelved imperfectly at the level of open hearts & minds, is preventive medicine strengthening me for the return to my clear pages of incomplete ideas to be reworked, revised & written as new worlds and words in all of their subjective configurations to eventually be processed into books that will hopefully be placed on the shelves of libraries, bookstores, homes, & other sanctuaries of learning to be found & browsed over by receptive booklovers, readers & writers looking for a retreat, looking for departure & yes spaces, looking for open heart surgery without the knife.