Almost to the End: The Shorter Poems: New and Old

If Bookshelves Groan

If bookshelves groan
It must be with pleasure –
Imagine being weighed down
By beauty and truth in print –
Let us pray
Buckled by Joyce and Prévert
Testing the strength of your muscles –
What delicious agony
Strain my tendons, Petrarch
With all your mental Laura lust.
After all
It is what one carries that counts.

Paris, November 14, 1987

These Haiku-like poems and longer verses represent nighttime thoughts and inspirations written down while reading Sam Hamill’s translations in The Sound of Water: Haiku by Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets. Some of them are actually based on the work of these poets, but most are simply inspired by them. Others come from the author’s own musings.

Unable to break into the tenured groves of academe, despite a solid and well-received doctoral dissertation, Brewster Chamberlin spent several decades of his life working as a historian, archivist, university teacher, lecturer, poet, essayist and writer of longer and shorter fictions while living in Manhattan, Germany, France (Provence), Italy, Washington DC and Greece. In 2001 he retired from an executive position at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC to move with his wife Lynn-Marie Smith to Key West, Florida, to concentrate on his writing.