When the rains came
\nthe books were unprepared,
\nlanguishing in their regulated air,
\nthey knew no more of wet
\nthan a babe of fire
\nor an animal of greed.<\/p>\n
The drops started slow,
\ncold dark moisture creeping
\nalong the undersides of pipes,
\nmelting through crevices,
\nplummeting in the manner of spring leaves,
\npatient for their fate.<\/p>\n
When they reached the wall they balked,<\/p>\n
hesitated.<\/p>\n
The drops behind piled down upon them,
\nforced them to push through,
\nnot hungry,
\nbut desperate to obey gravity,
\nhowever slowly they would go.<\/p>\n
Now, finding paper,
\nold trees,
\nthe water soaked,
\nspread,
\nsaturated those folds of wood and ink
\nand tried to remember
\nthe call that nature gave
\nto water and to wood.<\/p>\n
The water soaked,
\nand remembering by instinct,
\ntold the books, “drink. grow.”<\/p>\n
At first it was an onslaught
\nto paper that had never known
\nworse than cries of censorship,
\nwhich does not warp the page
\nnor smear the ink. Gradually,
\nlistening,
\nthey drank.
\nPage by page,
\nthoughts hazy as the ink ran,
\nas the pages twisted,
\nthey tried to remember being trees.<\/p>\n
Eventually the water stopped,
\nhuman error made right by human hand.
\nSome books were saved.
\nSome had gone mad, the lust to grow
\nturned their spines to sap
\nand their pagination
\nto rings of age beyond their memory.<\/p>\n
Later, tossed out amidst debris,
\nthe books, mad with life,
\nfound sediment,
\nwater,
\nsky.<\/p>\n
And from each page,
\na tiny sprig took hold,
\nfollowing down into the earth,
\nthe driving voice of gravity and life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When the rains came the books were unprepared, languishing in their regulated air, they knew no more of wet than a babe of fire or an animal of greed. The drops started slow, cold dark moisture creeping along the undersides of pipes, melting through crevices, plummeting in the manner of spring leaves, patient for their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,11,19],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}