Classic Poem

A book of poems lay open
white on the sand before the blue sea.
Wind turned the pages,
ruffling them one by one.
The warm words in the book had etched within them
a sad and beautiful heart.
Those printed words became birds, began to fly.
One, then another;
a hundred, a thousand,
higher, higher, glimmering, drawn into the sky,
white poems of birds, birds of poems.
Flower petals fell trembling from the sky.
Those birds that had recited poems in the sky
forgetting, unable to speak the verse they knew
became flowers falling above the sea.
Then they became stars in the far distant sky.
Those birds that had recited poems in the sky
the world's
sad and beautiful poems,
recited the poems in the book so brightly
they twinkled now, stars in the world of stars.