Book shops offer us civilizations
Democracies of the living and the dead –
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, and you
Over cups of coffee wrangling meter and rhyme 

Book shops offer us civilizations

James Weldon Johnson, Keats, and Claude McKay
Are questioning Auden along Aisle 3
Yevtushenko scoffs at bureaucracy
Ahkmatova stray dogs the lot of us 

Book shops offer us civilizations 

And only an unhappy man who has lost his way
Obsesses on the bookseller’s DNA