Ode to Bookshops

"I think [that bookstores are] essential [services]. It’s not as though, unfortunately, bookstores were mobbed with people. They could have them open and just let in two people at a time. On the other hand, I touch every book at a bookstore, so that may not be the best thing." - Fran Lebowitz, on being asked during the Covid pandemic which services she'd deem essential

You're not as vital to the great unwashed
masses of human carriers as gels
and masks and medicines, of course, but where
would we be without you? The hells
of autocratic thought could not exist
for long with bookshops open and revered,
the simple act of empathy's a cyst
in fascism's colon, so even as the weird
and bookless lot of pop music Stalins
cry out, I feel an atavistic twinge
of hope, when I see you still near.
Your shelves of Shakespeare, current pulp, volumes
of plays and poetry and histories and jokes,
remind me there's a universe, charted in your stockrooms.