Library, Monday

[intotheout]

Tip was on a poetry kick today. She had been since Friday, and her conversation with Kanan about swordplay as singing. She spent most of the morning drowning in old dead white guys talking about nature and sex, which -- gross, but sometime around lunch she dug into a cache of works from the Harlem Renaissance and things started getting interesting. She'd heard of Langston Hughes, of course, but not Countee Cullins or Arna Bontemps. She was a little disappointed to find out that those two were both men, but not so much she couldn't dig into their works anyway.

"Listen to this, Bill. 'Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.' I just -- damn."

Bill did excited loops, then zipped into the stacks. Tip frowned when he didn't come zipping back right away, then went to follow, only to find him poking excitedly at a thick hardcover volume.

"'The Collected Works of' -- Aud -- Audreh? 'Audre Lourde'. Okay." She flipped it open and read a few pages, then looked the author up on her phone.

"'When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.'"

If anyone needed Tip today, she was sitting in the poetry section, back against the end of one of the stacks, her nose buried in a book. Bill perched on her shoulder, and soon enough, she was reading poems out loud, letting the sound of them roll off her tongue and fill the peaceful air.

Yeah. Okay. She kind of thought she might "get" poetry now.

[open!]