Scriptorium

 

Worlds of iridescent gleam

all spring up glinting at the call

insouciant pens make, or they seem

to do: transform a drafty hall

into an arras-covered way

transecting palace corridors–

or granite boulders, flecked with grey,

to gravestones marking mythic wars’

highest heroics, men of myth;

or remnants of some long-forgot

mysterious monster’s kin and kith,

frozen in time upon the spot;

One peep at some dark road reveals

where mullioned windows lend a flash-

quick view of Heaven; one more steals

a different twitch of the eyelash–

a glimpse of Hell–its portals there

right in the same dark road just viewed

as commonplace by those who wear

mere men’s eyes to the interlude.

The glasses worn, instead, by scribes

can coalesce the simplest things

into the marvels of their tribes,

into the wealth of queens and kings,

into kaleidoscopic joys,

playgrounds of sound and touch and hope,

can turn mere scribblings and noise

into a length of golden rope

binding together known, unknown

and things not yet imagined still,

telling those tales their pens have grown

out of pure nothingness and nil

to shape breathtaking, worthy lands

and characters of dash, to cleanse

the mundane world with authors’ hands,

the swordlike flourish of those pens.