Library of Congress – parliamentary poem
Library of Congress, The New Yorker [no paywall] By Arthur Size, Published October 13, 2025 – Arthur Sze was appointed the twenty-fifth U.S. Poet Laureate in 2025.
His books include “Into the Hush” and “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems
“You peer down a lit corridor
on the fifth tier of stacks
where a million books breathe
on shelves; here’s a book
on neutrinos captured in Antarctica,
here’s another on solar flares.
A curator displays a book
in Vai script and points to a triangle
with two dots; you wonder
if you are looking at a pregnant
woman, an enslaved man,
or a human ear; you pull a book
off a shelf and, opening it,
hear Del aire al aire, como
then snap it shut: the air hums
with honeybees. A second curator
points at glittering gold script;
though you can’t divine a word,
you guess Farsi and dive
into the marlin-blue depth of the page.
A third curator shows you 心遠
woodblock printed on mulberry paper,
and as you read a distant mind
leaves the earth around it,
you smell daylilies in a courtyard
and know you may caravan
to Timbuktu, but there’s no
pear-blossom end to what’s within reach.”
