Being taught to read

· by · in dVerse, poetry, the aged librarian. ·

He who can, Does, He who cannot, Teaches.
George Bernard Shaw

The aged librarian
cater for the books to remember
the teachers from his youth
who taught him

to quell his curiosity
with encyclopedic text from a to z
learning to find
courage to question, and later
seeking deeper into prose
or distill to verse,

he was never one to listen
but he learned to seek
digging deep and deeper
into sources.

He learned to read
and learn, but
he never learned
the art of writing
anything but the shadow
of a wellknown verse.

He doesn’t blame his teachers
for anything except
to sometimes stop to think
instead of seeking
for the wisdom
of someone infinitely wiser.

Image generated with Chatgpt using this prompt: I want to have an oil painting in the style of a dutch painter depicting an aged librarian sitting alone in a huge library reading from a book by candle light.

Today Punam inspires us to write about teachers at dVerse, The background is that on this past Saturday it was teacher’s day in India. The day was chosen because it was the birthday of India’s second president Dr. S. Radhakrishnan who himself was a scholar and teacher.

In my poem I went into the mind of the aged librarian who alas simply cannot stop learning and reading instead of creating by himself.

8 responses to “Being taught to read”

  1. Welcome back, aged librarian! Thank you for making my day, Björn! I can imagine him quelling his curiosity ‘with encyclopaedic text from a to z’ and ‘digging deep and deeper into sources’. It would make me sad to never learn the art of writing ‘anything but the shadow of a wellknown verse’.

  2. Ah, the aged librarian! So good to meet him again. Well, now we know that he is an avid reader and that’s the reason he loves being amongst books.
    Not all can be writers.

  5. Bjorn, you put a lot of thought into your poem. When so many educational institutions teach only the points of view of others with no focus on critical thinking, it is no wonder there are so many aged librarians.

    That said, it’s a thankless job to keep books in order, and increasingly librarians are expected to become warriors against censorship.

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