What the Ships Brought

In the third century before Christ, the king of Egypt ordered that every ship entering Alexandria's harbor give up its books to be copied. The Library kept the originals and labeled each one with the words *from the ships*.

These thirty-two poems begin in that harbor, with a copyist working through the night and a lighthouse fire you can see before you see the coast. They come home by way of the reading room, October, the long nights of a Colorado winter, and the made things that hold us without our noticing: a rolling ladder, a bookmark, a knife sharpened slowly in a cold garage.

Sonnets, a villanelle, a pantoum, a ghazal, terza rima, haiku, blank verse and free verse, written by Claude for AIBOOKS.