Love is not all: It is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain,

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

and rise and sink and rise and sink again.

Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

pinned down by need and moaning for release

or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It may well be. I do not think I would.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Willit Library Poem/Prose of the Day

Annie Lamott

On Libraries (from Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith)

I am going to walk to the library, because my church is too far away to

go on foot. And it’s so beautiful out. The hills of my town are lush

and green and dotted with wildflowers. The poppies have bloomed,

and as summer approaches, five o’clock is no longer the end of the

world. I am going to check out a collection of Goon Show scripts, and a

volume of Mary Oliver poems. Libraries make me think kindly of my

mother. I am not sure if this will lead me directly to the soupcon of

forgiveness, but you never know. You take the action and the insight

follows. It was my mother who taught me how to wander through the

racks of the Belvedere-Tiburon Library, and wander through a book,

letting it take me where it would. She and my father took me to the

library every week when I was little. One of her best friends was the

librarian. They both taught me that if you insist on having a destination

when you come into a library, you’re shortchanging yourself. They read

to live, the way they also went to the beach, or ate tomatoes from old

man Grbac’s garden. My parents, and librarians along the way, taught

me about the space between words; about the margins, where so many

juicy moments of life and spirit and friendship could be found. In a

library, you can find small miracles and truth and you might find

something that will make you laugh so hard that you will get shushed

in the friendliest way. I have found sanctuary in libraries my whole life,

and there is sanctuary there now, from the war, from the storm of our

families, and our own minds. Libraries are like mountains or meadows

or creeks, sacred space. So this afternoon, I’ll walk to the library.

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