I Like To Smell Books Poem by Patti Masterman

I like to smell books in libraries
Inhaling as much as can hold,
Imagining I can smell fairies;
Or something else, very like mold.

It may seem that I hold inside me
Binding glue and drying ink;
Bookmarks of old, pressed flowers,
A powdery smell, I think.

The classics, like bridal bouquets;
Dry biographies, like cotton gins,
And slick, foreign travel brochures-
Smelled up, till they're worn quite thin.

And Poe smells like tobacco,
And Chaucer like coldest granite,
And Egypt smells like Morocco,
And the Earth just smells, of planet.

Have you ever smelled first love?
A delicate eau de cologne,
With winds fresh from heaven above,
And angelic wings, out on loan.

And the smell of a first disenchantment
Smells like something that long ago burnt;
But hope is the pages enchantment,
Which we wish we will never unlearn.