These strange riches given,
Stand crumbling on the sullen street of times past.
Grandma’s house with its ceiling planks bent,
A violent crack runs wild, the length of the dining room,
Shut doors,
melded to frames,
Of childhoods past, stories kept,
Flooded memories.
But Scheherezade still waits inside Arabian Nights,
Bound in real leather, tightly fit in the carved Italian bookcase.
Framed maps of antique parchment rest about the entrance hall,
Leaning on the walls, waiting for something,
Maybe the final collapse.
And I wonder,
Those long gone explorers,
cartographers of time,
¿Might their eyes have met riches just as strange as mine?