For Keepers of Books

By Ursula Murphy

Although words fail her, books are a comfort, and reassured by their solidness,

my mother smiles to the touch of dust jacket and leaf, propped up on pillows in a nursing home bed. 

A decade earlier, in tears at the evening news, she watches the smouldering ruins of Mosul’s university library, where on the Tigris’ burning banks, reed dwelling warblers of Nineveh once sang in courtship ritual for the scribes of Ashurbanipal, lion hunter and scholar,

as they pressed stylus into the soft clay of cuneiform epic and omen,

before tablets were smashed and burnt, and preserved through ages, fire-baked and buried in a palace ruins.

Of all my childhood crimes, the capital offence was crayon-defacement of a book.

It could provoke even more horror than the waxy red trail I once drew on patterned wallpaper up the stairs, 

forgiven, I was told because the misdemeanour announced the onset of measles, 

      and my mother concluded I must have been delirious.

      Scribbles on fairytale pages, however, were a different story.

Writing mattered, my mother said, insisting on penmanship that was orderly and purposeful.

I see myself then aged five or six, seated beside her at the kitchen table, 

she is overseeing my calligraphy, tracing faint lines to guide the early letters, 

later removed with a scrap of stale bread, better she said than any fancy eraser. 

      Always careful with words, she was a librarian, once upon a time, before my brother and I

delighting in a life penned in the inkiness of possibility, 

sourcing, acquiring and cataloguing by heart and blessed I liked to think by Nisaba, 

goddess of writing and knowledge and grain.

Until they forced her to write a resignation letter,

the grey men who decreed that married women had no place in libraries, 

and I imagine her tears but sometimes as a teenager, tracing titles along the county library’s shelves, 

     I was surprised to discover her hand in   Dewey, 

poised and confident, her elegant digits jauntily slanted on a book’s thin spine:

      her colophon among keepers of books. 

By Ursula Murphy