Afterwards
when all went silent;
after words turned ash,
the last remaining pillar fell
and mortar
crumbled into dust,
the aged librarian
mumbled verses from his dying books
turned skyward, cloud-gazed,
stumbled as he turned and left;
leaving only footprints in the sand
that once was kingdom, library:
that held the answers
we have lost.
The Temple by Tomasz Zaczeniuk, Used with permission @fotowizjer
The desolation of the picture made me continue to write about the last books and our guardian of poems. This is a 55 word flash for Kerry at toads.
—
March 2, 2019
Björn Rudbergs writings 
Nice one, B!
Bleak….
What a loss That would be. One I cannot even imagine to comprehend.
I like the rhythm of this – like the aged librarian slowly giving up his last breath for the knowledge he has guarded for so long.
The voice of this poem is as defeated as the image suggests, but I love the vestige of hope in ‘the aged librarian
mumbled verses from his dying books’. Perhaps when all else fails, the oral tradition will persist, in however humble a form that may be.
At school we have an annual festival for the recitation of prose and poetry, so that ‘learning off by heart’ is still a thing to be rewarded.
Maybe we should restart the tradition of retelling stories… Personally i believe that poetry needs to reinvent the tradition of storytelling, and learning by heart is a great reason for using poetry to tell stories
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I love the librarian poems.. and we’ve lost all the answers, haven’t we…and now we just keep asking the wrong questions!
Bjorn, I’m glad to see the return of your old librarian. I hope he finds a better, more ptomising place to work for his next job.
..
A fine fin-de-siecle Bjorn! Hope the aged librarian forgot to lock up when he left, so that dust and words become silence …
This is incredibly emotive, Bjorn! I can see him mumbling verses and cloud-gazing.. such a unique response to the prompt! ❤️
Sigh
A marvelous story of the aged librarian.
Oh, I love this take. I don’t think people really understand what it means to lose a library.
You embraced a theme similar to mine Björn. The image seems to cry out for ending, loss, destruction – some unfortunate finality..