For the Girl Who Reads Standing at the Bookstall

Sunday, Abids,
second-hand books laid out on the footpath
like a harvest nobody ordered —

and you, in a school uniform on a holiday,
standing at the edge of the tarpaulin
with a book you cannot afford
open to page ninety-one.

You have been here since ten.
You read the way a person drinks
after walking a long way in May.
The bookseller knows. He has started
rearranging the Sidney Sheldons
so he doesn’t have to look at you
and decide.

Somebody’s name is on the flyleaf
in blue ink, a date from 1987,
a line underlined by a stranger
who also needed it.

Read, girl. Read till the light goes.
Read with your weight on one foot, then the other.
There will be offices, there will be exams,
there will be years
when you only read the names of medicines
and the backs of electricity bills —

but this was yours:
a Sunday, a footpath, a hundred pages
nobody can take back now,
carried home in you
like change you didn’t spend,
the city’s whole noise
gone quiet
around one turning page.