They said that the Library was full,
Were going to pull it down,
They’d set up a whole new Google School
On the other side of town,
And nobody went there anymore,
It was bulging at the seams,
With every tome that had stood alone,
The source of a writer’s dreams.

‘What can we get from a paper book
That is not beyond a trace,
When just by tapping a couple of keys
We can pull it from cyberspace.’
They’d lost the sense of a cosy nook
On a languid day in June,
When curled up there with a thrilling book
They could drift and dream ‘til noon.

The Library was a silent place
With its soot-stained yellow brick,
It rose a couple of storeys, and
The air in there was thick,
The shelves rose up to the ceilings, more
Than twenty feet in the air,
You had to call a librarian
To climb up a sliding stair.

But up above there were volumes bound
In a red and gold Morroc,
Their wisdom gleaned from the ages in
A perfect printed book,
Though some had never been taken down,
Their pages were pristine,
They waited patiently there for me,
A world that I’d never seen.

They closed the Library down one day
And nobody even cared,
The lights went out for the final time
The cost of the power conserved,
A gloom then settled between the shelves
That had held the stuff of life,
The books, still patiently waiting with
Their sagas of joy and strife.

I broke on into the Library
Through a badly padlocked door,
Made my way with the aid of a torch
On up to the second floor,
The tension there was electric, I
Could sense them asking ‘Why?’
‘Why has the world deserted us,’
And the books let out a sigh.

I looked on up and I saw a book
And it seemed to freeze my gaze,
Glowing softly it shimmered there
In a pale, blue misty haze,
I reached on up and I took it down
Though it tingled in my hands,
My mind lit up like a picture book
Of far and distant lands.

I laid it down and it opened up,
‘The Book of the Universe,’
Then stars and planets poured out from what
I thought was an ancient hearse,
I heard some planetary music from
The deception that Neptune brings,
And floated up from the floor in there
Surrounded by Saturn’s rings.

Knowledge flowed from the book to me
Though I couldn’t catch it all,
It passed me by in a stream, just like
A glittering waterfall,
And then a voice in my head intoned
‘You can pass this message on,
You’ll never be able to smile again
Once all the books are gone!’

David Lewis Paget