It is the kiss of words against paper,
The dance of young, and wrinkled and working hands,
Smudged with graphite and lingering traces of prose and poetry.

Scrawled sentences swallowed by parchment,
Encapsulated by its embrace
Rest frozen on the seamless faces of the pages they are stitched to.

Tumbling words extracted from the minds that move the dancing hands
Soar from pen to paper,
Drift as light as a feather
And mimic the gentle touch of fingertips meeting cheekbones
When they land only seconds later.

Between every passage,
Journeys and voyages embark to other worlds,
Far-off planets
And lands that humanity has not yet explored.

Words become beings,
As they morph into sunbathed images,
Coded strands of raw emotion
And the soft, hard touch of literature.

When they mesh together,
Beautifully and without strain,
They twirl,

And sing,

And touch,

And scream,

And thus we feel,

And yearn,

And love,

And so,

A world without words,
Without the voices that have recorded our past
And spoke the stories of those unable to speak for themselves

Is emptiness.