The fire is a thorough & voracious reader.
Page by page my old manuscript turns gray & brittle
& when the mist thickens into rain,
the smoking pile emits a long thin sigh.
I live in an Appalachian hollow in the Juniata watershed of central Pennsylvania, and spend a great deal of time walking in the woods. Here’s a bio. All of my writing here is available for reuse and creative remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. For attribution in printed material, my name (Dave Bonta) will suffice, but for web use, please link back to the original. Contact me for permission to waive the “share alike” provision (e.g. for use in a conventionally copyrighted work).
“The fire is a thorough & voracious reader.”
Love that. It could be the epigraph of “I, Reader”.
You’d be welcome to it.
I hate to see a book burning. Brings up shuddering shades of Savonarola or Fahrenheit 451. Even an old manuscript is a record of what you were doing and thought at the time. But then, I’m a hopeless pack rat of the past sooo hope it was a lovely light.
Or the Nazis… But it’s definitely a good line.