Poem: "No Friend as Loyal"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem is spillover from the February 3, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a post from elinox. It also fills the "Validate Yourself" square in my 2-1-26 card for the Valentines Bingo fest. This poem is the second freebie courtesy of new prompters gs_silva, ionelv, and Laura G.


"No Friend as Loyal"


Everyone has their favorite books,
old copies with creased covers
and yellowed pages, spotted
here and there with tea rings
or crumb stains or mud from
getting dropped on the ground
during a hastily planned adventure.

They smell of vanilla, spices, leather,
binding memories in a fine bouquet.

Touching them provides a way
to ground yourself, validate yourself,
remind you of who you are and
who your real friends are, the paths
that you have walked together.

It doesn't matter which titles
you choose to read or who
you know or where your life
may take you over time:

There is no friend as
loyal as a book.

* * *

"There is no friend as loyal as a book."
-- Ernest Hemingway

The science of "the smell of books"

Comments

[smurfqueen2948]

"silence is a true friend who never betrays" - confucius

i love books from the 1800s they smell like biscuits :) im sure you could cook a page for a week and get some good tasting soup or youd die O_x. in the olden days they made leather soup actually. ever done tree bark soup? during ww1 or ww2 when they were poor and stuff they found 1 that was just like coffee :) and vanilla is bark i thought long ago but i guess not. cork is made from bark 30% of the area of portuglar is covered in cork oak :)

[(Anonymous)]

💗
--Laura G

This

[dialecticdreamer]

This is why leaving California with not one book was more terrible than leaving at all.