PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

The Archivist

Breath—
caught in the rafters’ dim lattice,
a leaf turns,
seasonless.

Dust,
a pale script
unfolding in the hollow of a hand.

Spines incline—
mute elders—
their gilt a slow
constellation.

No pen,
yet the air
breaks into lines,
each pause
a door
unlatched in silence.

Volume shut—
not ending,
but the echo
of a word
never spoken.

.

The Archive Wing

The door is oak,
its brass plate worn to a soft blur
by decades of palms.
Inside, the air holds
the dry perfume of paper and cloth,
a faint trace of polish on the banisters.

Shelves rise like terraces,
each step a year,
each row a street in the city’s past.
Ledgers with spines like brick courses
stand shoulder to shoulder,
their titles lettered in gilt
that catches the afternoon light.

A clerk in a grey waistcoat
moves along the gallery,
his pencil ticking in the margin
of a bound minute book.
Below, a student copies
a map of the tramlines
into a ruled notebook —
ink pooling in the loops of her script.

Here, the city keeps
its own autobiography:
births and bankruptcies,
contracts and commemorations,
all pressed flat between covers.
The silence is not absence,
but the pause between sentences
in a paragraph still being written.

.