This poem
was written for Jackie
Karuti's exhibition at the Goethe Institut. The Exhibition is titled 'Where
books go to die', and is a follow up of the art performance in 2013 titled, 'In
the case of books'.
Last wishes
When I die,
please don’t preserve me spotless.
Refrain from
sending me into a corner,
to remain unsullied
and untouched.
When I am
done, don’t put me in a box in the attic
for a
grandchild to discover decades later
and mull
over what memories and scandals
I have overheard;
what whispered secrets I have sealed.
I have never
doubted that you love me.
Curiosity
overcame you the day you first heard my name,
and morphed
into something like a passion.
You sent a
friend across the sea to find me and bring me home.
You finger
my spine and feel the current as pages turn,
smile and
remember the places we went,
and then put
me back in my place.
It is not
you. It is me. I want more.
I want you
to cast me into a web of hungry hands:
send me onto
the street to inhale the dust and sweat of workers;
into a
hospice to absorb the thoughts of the dying;
send me into
a public library for a jobless man to find;
put me into
the hands of a homeless mother to keep warm;
let me die a
second, third, fourth death,
in the hands
of others.
Anything but
that shelf where no one comes,
or, worse,
where they might come, Oh and Ah,
and walk
away without feeling
as if I were
a shark in an aquarium;
as if I were
a sacred island where only priests go.
This is a plea
against cages of wood and glass and metal.
Set me free
to be held against a fifth, a sixth, a seventh bosom;
to hear the
rustle of grass and leaves in a park as I gaze
into famished
eyes; to become damp with the moist breath
of a reader
who falls asleep with me on her face
and in her
dreams; to be felt and stained and absorbed
over and
over and over and over till I crumble into dust.
