The line stretched for a kilometer
three thousand people trembling
in the cold, rain turning to sleet,
to bid farewell to a library.
An army of children had emptied the shelves,
carted books across town like the dead
who’d once erupted from the graves of Paris,
whose skeletons were hauled by horse
and hand to the catacombs
where they’d rest for eternity.
Now Oslo’s books will overlook the sea,
readers will mark time by how they
recall when a library was a landlocked
fortress, a bunker of cement and paper,
the only ocean the one you saw in
Moby-Dick or Rachel Carson.
Teaching us to say goodbye was how
we remembered what once lived:
to acknowledge the destruction
committed in plain air.
What if we said goodbye more often
the way children do
when they first learn how,
every parting momentous—
like a ship leaving port, the weather
deck full of people searching for
beloveds, to wave goodbye and good
luck, as if luck might stop a gust
from tearing a ship off course.
We look fondly on the days when
we stood the sea different from the sea
because one we’d seen and the other
we’d seen in our mind’s eye, a way
of saying we are learning to live in a world
where imagination and remembrance are the same thing
because they allow us to deny that so
much left behind worked perfectly fine.