“Tales of the Magic Library”

A Golden Shovel after “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson

What — the Magic Library? Well, I’m — I’m sure you’ve heard, but then nobody Really has. Maybe we should ask who . . . Who cares about it? What are —

Books — anyway? A piece of you?
A piece of me, too? Are —
Are they doors or floors — or bores? You —
Can ask, but, I suppose, nobody
Really knows. They must be too . . .
Too grand and expressive today, then —
Or maybe falling short. But, yes, there’s —
There’s such a thing as the Magic Library, where a — A story waits for us, a pair,
A pair of nobodys, of dreamers, of lost ones, of —
Of something. You see, the Magic Library waits for us!

But, when people see the Magic Library, they don’t . . .
Don’t recognize it; shelves and shelves — and the stories they tell! The magic, they rush right past it, they’d —
They’d rather it squawk at them, advertise,
If you will. But, well, don’t you —
Don’t you see yet? Holding everything we need to know,
The Magic Library must hide from how —
How cruel and weary and dark and dreary
The outside world has become, in order to . . .
To keep itself spectacular, or else it’d be —
Well, the same as work! Reading to live as another somebody!

Yet I can’t begin to imagine how
A Magic Library holds enough for all the public;
Like those who are old, those who are young; like,
Like those who live for love or for a thrill, or a —
A simpler tale, with illustrations of a frog.
How wonderful it is of the Magic Library to . . .
To welcome us readers, and those who wish to tell
Tales of their own — of one’s —
One’s joys, sorrows, dreams — even under a false name — Because, you see, this library, the —
The Magic Library, is open for the livelong,
Livelong day — though most thoroughly enjoyed in June,

When there’s naught for some but to —
To fly freely through every page, discovering anew an Idea of Imagination! Oh, but the admiring
Is lacked — most are more likely to walk in a bog!

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

When I sat down to write this poem, I knew I wanted to do something different than I’ve done before — after all, people would actually be seeing this; it wasn’t just for me to read. It had me stuck for at least a week, until the idea of a “magic library” popped into my head. See, I love to read, and I love it when other people love to read, but I grew up around people who didn’t love to read. I could never understand why, because bookstores and libraries and all those places are just so magical — they can take you anywhere, teach you anything, let you become anyone. So, I had this idea about a Magic Library, albeit I couldn’t find a way to express it in a fantastical enough way.

That’s when “The Magic Library,” two terrible lines on a sheet of paper, became “Tales of the Magic Library — A Golden Shovel.” In short, a Golden Shovel is a form of poetry where the last word of every line is a word from a different writer’s poem, song, novel, etc. — in my case, from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems. (I’ve never written a poem like this before, though, so I’ll have to apologize if it’s terrible.) I’ve read about a quarter through my collection of Dickinson’s poems, but “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” has always stood out to me. I mean, it connects to the concept of libraries a bit, don’t you think? We get to be nobody, to escape ourselves, as we dive into someone else’s writing that numerous others have read, too — and we find pieces of ourselves along the way, without having to claim they belong to us.

(Credit to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/159875/poetry-and-form#golden for exposing me to the concept of a Golden Shovel, and https://ypn.poetrysociety.org.uk/workshop/what-is-a-golden-shovel-with-peter-kahn/ for explaining it in a great deal more detail.)