Poetry Friday: In The Library by Charles Simic

We normally don’t feature poets that we are not deeply familiar with. This Poetry Friday, though, (hosted this week by Bibliophile at Life is Better with Books), I am willing to make an exception. As I surfed through poems that speak about the wonders of the library, I came across the name of Charles Simic.

AP Photo/Richard Drew. Click on the image to be taken to the websource.

Charles was born on 1938 in Belgrade Yugolasvia but migrated to the United States when he was around fifteen years old and earned his Bachelor’s degree from New York University. He has published 60 books of poems and won a number of awards such as the Pulitzer Prize in 1990, the International Griffin Poetry Prize for Selected Poems in 2005 and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2008 (source here). He was also appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007, an award which he cherished greatly because according to Simic: “I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15″ (source here). I thought that was quite inspiring. Here is the poem that caught me, and I hope it will do the same to you. I am glad that our new theme has introduced me to this wonderful poet.

In The Library

There’s a book called

“A Dictionary of Angels.”

No one has opened it in fifty years,

I know, because when I did,

The covers creaked, the pages

Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful

As species of flies.

The sky at dusk

Used to be thick with them.

You had to wave both arms

Just to keep them away.
 

Now the sun is shining

Through the tall windows.

The library is a quiet place.

Angels and gods huddled

In dark unopened books.

The great secret lies

On some shelf Miss Jones

Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps

Her head tipped as if listening.

The books are whispering.

I hear nothing, but she does.

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