The Drowned Book Poem by Eva Bourke

'...deeper than did ever plummet sound//
I'll drown my book.'
Prospero in The Tempest. Shakespeare
Act V Scene 1

Hidden in a cave of leaves
I spent my childhood reading high above
the garden's afternoon ritual

where the lion of summer snored under the table and coffee was served.
Letters followed one another

black and ant-like across the page forming words,
a trail of sweetness towards a major key
that smelled of sailors and apples from China..

The goddess of silence lived in the garden and her sisters Forgetting and Invention,
stern, calico-clad, laurel-wreathed,

weaving pictograms into durable snares,
Assyrian, hook and braid, stone jug, owl,
water pot, ibis, fox fur.

I was hooked, lost to the world, my mother's call,
my brothers' games, football, hide and seek.
Poems ignited in my heart,

they were a freshly opened jar of condiments, a planet-cluster
settling on a gate, a snowdrift piling up.

I would read till dawn. My father would catch me
at four with the light still on.

I'd been to the sources of night and found
the magic book
the sorcerer Prospero had drowned.