The Archivist

In the breath between rafters,
a figure tends the slow orchard of pages,
turning each leaf as though coaxing
a season from sleep.

Their hands move in the grammar of dust,
palming the soft weight of forgotten syllables,
listening for the faint pulse
in the paper’s marrow.

Spines lean toward them
like elders at a fire,
offering fragments of weather,
the taste of a vanished street,
a name that once rang clear as glass.

They do not write —
yet the air thickens with unwritten stanzas,
each breath a line break,
each glance a rhyme
folded into the city’s long dream.

When they close a volume,
it is not an ending,
but the quiet click of a lock
on a door that will open again
in another century’s hand.

 

 

 

 

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