A LIFE SENTENCE

A LIFE SENTENCE


This voluntary life sentence
of reading random words refined into a sentence .
This heart's labour I serve reading the books that I love.
The printed works I review
looking from another's point of view.

How much more homage to Homer can there be?
From Chapman's rhymes to Fagle's lines
definitely more than three.
Any new guide to take us though the Inferno
and tour the kabuki and Japanese noh ?

Blessed with a bilingual curse,
is there enough pantun and English verse
to quench this reader's thirst ?
On the internet there is a surfeit
of writers I have yet to meet.
Tagore, Thakeray, Frost and Snow
some of the authors I would like to know.

Will writers stop writing,
translators stop translating,
publishers stop publishing
and Microsoft stop digitising ?
Will I ever have time to catch up on my reading ?

The more I read
the more I become incomplete.
The more I know, the less I know.
With a book on my couch I lie
I will read and read until I die.

If you should come across an apparition scary
in some quiet corner of a deserted library
do not be alarmed , it will not do you harm.
It is only a spirit in eternal bliss,
the ghost of a reader reading in peace.

Yahya Sofi Hussain
Ampang Ulu Klang.
30th October 2007

First published in the March 2008 issue of Dumex's HOUSECALL