Johnny Adicks Poet Free verse

Death of A Library

When they died,
it was not only a heart that stopped,
nor merely a voice that fell silent.

A library burned.

Not the kind of library?built from stone and timber,
with catalogues and numbered shelves,
but one assembled slowly
from years of seeing, wondering,
remembering.

Whole aisles vanished at once.

The exact shade of evening
on a childhood road.
The joke that grew funnier
with every retelling.
The face of a friend
whose name no one else could recall.
The lessons learned from mistakes
never written down.

Volumes collapsed into ash.

There were books on grief
annotated by survival.
Books on love
dog-eared by devotion.
Books on ordinary days
that seemed forgettable
until no one remained
who remembered them.

Some shelves held facts:
birthdays,
addresses,
recipes,
directions.

Others held things
for which no language exists—
a mother's glance,
the weight of a hand on a shoulder,
the private meaning of a shared silence.
And though a few books
had been copied,
lent out,
quoted to others,
most existed nowhere else.

Now the doors are closed.
The lamps are dark.
Dust settles where stories once stood.

We gather what fragments remain:
a sentence remembered,
a photograph,
a habit inherited,
a tale told secondhand.
Yet we know that countless
volumes are gone forever.

For every person who dies
takes with them a collection
that can never be rebuilt—
a singular archive
of a singular life.

And so we mourn not only the one who left,
but the unwritten histories,
the unshared wisdom,
the irreplaceable library
that disappeared with them.

~Johnny Adicks
2026.06
Inspired by what my wife Cindi said, “When a person dies, that library of knowledge dies with them”.

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