Summer Reading

(Found here)

For Edward on his Fiftieth

There’s winter

in a closed book,

a dormancy

of hidden words,

a pre-dawn impossibility

to the beckoning

image in the title.

With a new book

the crisp pages

are thin ice

cracking in springtime,

the clear current

of the story

just beginning to make

itself visible.

I love the birdsong

in a first line,

the wake-up

sense of stretching

on the right hand page,

the imperceptible

sense of

a new season breathed into

a landscape, a character,

a chapter,

things beginning to flit

from branch to branch,

the first lazy drift

of a bee toward the flowers

as the story opens

and suddenly

in the concentrated

listening,

the warm arc of the sun
is right on your neck,

as you sit in the garden

reading and receiving

the life giving rays,

arriving all the way

from far out

in the darkness, charged

and made benevolent

by the atmosphere of blue

and the shade of trees

and the birdsong

surrounding your concentration

on a story,

a dream, a drama,

a life come alive on the page,

your own intellect

and imagination

a kind of sunlight, a far out star

illuminating

from a great distance

the world you read,

making it sing,

making it new,

making it real,

making a summer

of a closed book.

~David Whyte