Poetry Books To Read Mga Nobela at Kwento

It was a small volume of poems by a writer named Olaren the Younger, who had lived two hundred years ago at the edge of the eastern continent and had written about water and waiting. The book had been lost in the fire. She had been trying to remember the poems ever since. She recited two for me. The ones she could remember most of. They were simple. They were about a river going past a stone. They were the kind of poems a man read when he had spent his life ruling a founder pack and needed a quiet thing at the end of the day. I wrote the poems down. I wrote them on a clean page in my study. I added them to the drawer where I kept Mira's letters and my father's last note.

His smile could light up the entire library. He settles into the leather wingback, my favourite chair, the one I curl up in when I want to feel held, and opens his book. I catch a glimpse of the cover. Pablo Neruda. Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. “Why are you reading that?” He looks up at me. “What?” I clear my throat. What the fuck are you doing Vanessa? I adjust the collar of my shirt. “Neruda. Why are you reading it?”

He began contemplating death. I turned another. Still death. “No.” I put it back. The sixth was poetry. Better. I opened near the middle. Grain. I read the next poem. Also grain. I checked farther back. Rain. Then grain after rain. I closed the book. Six Veyrathi books. Not one romance. This was a catastrophe of modest but genuine proportions. I looked at the shelf again in case a seventh had developed while I was reading about grain. It had not.