Mind Your Crack Poem by Douglas Scotney

Dear Future Library Book Borrower.

Times before you touched only your own old hand grease
when reading your library book,
you did best not to think of where it had been,
or knew that it had been read by locals
and you'd know if anything was going around.

You tried not to forget to remember
not to borrow a book
in flu-September.

There is a brief period,
which is now,
between those two eras,
in which I can have a book brought in
from any public library in the state of South Australia.

'Ancient Evenings', what I call 'Mind Your Crack',
comes from the coal mine of Leigh Creek.
I'm not so worried its pages are black.