Monkey’s Book Burnings
16 June 2018
Monkey’s Book Burning
(Remembering Cervantes’s Scrutiny of the Library
and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451)
Who burnt Monkey’s books?
Who took them from their shelves,
evicted them into the courtyard,
built them into book stacks, like hay,
then applied gasoline, and a lighted match?
Monkey watches in horror
as smoke and flame devour his beloveds.
He tries to approach, but the fire is too hot.
One book jumps out from the smoke, still smoldering,
and monkey snatches it and carries it away beneath his coat,
the fire burn branded into its cover,
the skin still sizzling on monkey’s hand.
How many books were burned that day?
How many monkeys now walk in the woods,
trying to re-create their lives,
circulating their memories by word of mouth?
Moth is to candle as book is to flame.
Monkey runs his hand in and out of the candle.
He recalls the bonfires in the streets.
He coughs through the throat burn of smoke.
He touches the blistered scars of flame.
rogermoorepoet 
Right up my dystopian alley! Civilization rests on sturdy underpinnings but fools can kick them away.
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In double quick time or less. I am staggered by the rapidity, how quickly a good book burns. Luckliy, none of mine are worth burning!
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You never know what words will motivate autocrats to react with fear. Beauty of the metaphor. Those monkeys ….
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I m really enjoying meeting them again and reading the poems. It really is great fun. So much anarchy …
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This conveys so much emotion: despair and desperation. What a picture you’ve painted. Wow!
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But there is still hope: Monkey survives, and he carried one book away with him, rescued from the ruins …
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Roger: What a beautiful project! What a dramatic difference between silently reading poems, and hearing them read by the author. How they burst into colour when read with energy and knowledge of their message. Would that more poets could give such voice to their work, instead of the usual poet-drone. More! -j
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This is such an encouraging comment, Jan. Thank you so much. I’ll get on with this. Lots of good stuff coming through! Thank you so much. Do you need text as well as voice? Just listening is good, but ….
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I have a copy, thanks. I’ll put it next to the computer so I can read along, I’m working on a similar project for a friend: printing a singers lyrics as poems, so the reader can read, then listen to the CDs to hear all the emotion and colours the voice and instruments add. Feel free to sing your poems too!
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Thank you for the invitation, Jan: you’ve never heard my singing voice! However … in the secrecy of my little world ….
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Roger, I am at a total loss for words here; not sure if I dare say what memories it evokes.
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Just left me a bit breathless too, John. Everything from the Spanish Inquisition, the Conquest of Mexico (especially Oaxaca) Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Krystallnacht … and it’s still happening … we destroy the knowledge that we don’t wish to believe in …
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