Enter Book

Apr 11

One of the quietest joys of life is opening a book—anticipating the adventure of traveling through words we’ve never before read or, sometimes even better, wrapping often-read words back around ourselves like a comforting blanket.

In this poem, Dalia Taha reminds us that reading does more than transport, challenge, and comfort: it transforms us, immersing us so fully that we return to the world altered, newly able to see and name what we hadn’t known before. May we relish every word.

Enter Book

by Dalia Taha (translated by Sara Elkamel)

The book you held in your hands
now lies on the nightstand by your bed, in its heart
the lines you sketched
under the sentences you read more than once, bewildered,
before you put the book down
and started pacing aimlessly between the rooms.
You let it drown you for a full week,
took it everywhere you went;
you read it alone in bed,
and stretched out on the sofa while the family’s voices
drifted toward you from the other room.
Whenever you’d lift your head,
you found yourself
face-to-face with the world,
glancing at the sky outside your window;
ready, at last, to converse with the hills.
Every book grants you the language
you need to make contact
with something you had no idea even existed:
a tree’s pores, a fox’s nose,
sadness on a face, a nation’s suffering.
Look how beautiful you look as you read.
Look how peaceful you look
as you let an entire continent colonize you;
as you lay the book down on the nightstand,
as if returning to the world
something that belongs to it—
as you stand, dazzled by the hills
as though the book, too,
has returned to the world
something that belongs to it.