Spool

Spool

A twisted wheel that keeps the world on track,
A silent keeper of skin‑thick tape,
A battered little cylinder turned in the flicker of a lamp,
Its quiet face a guardian of the writ.

In the print‑shop where the clattering presses sigh,
Spools of ink‑plaster wait, blue‑grey‑black,
Stacked like soldiers in row for the next great run,
Each curious wound a promise of a future line.

The weaver in the attic, fingers dusted with fibre,
Uses a spool to hold the whisper of linen or cotton,
Thread stretched thin, pulled close, in measured dance,
The yarn unfurls, alive, a memory caught in motion.

The cables of the loft, thick, brown as old oaks,
Are fed into quiet spools in forgotten pockets,
Lazily winding, the static on a darkened night,
Laying the invisible roads that make the signals glide.

There is a gentle weight in the shaft’s worn surface,
In the cycle of a spool, the right of everything spinning:
Prioritised by the hand that turns it, by the breath that writes it,
And thus the spool—simple, stubborn, softly decisive.

In the quiet hour, shop‑lighters dim, the toast slices in a buttery arc,
The spool sits, patient, on the kitchen counter—
A wheel of eternity, a keeper of threads, a quiet poet’s toy,
Its tiny groove a world in which all the colours can be kept.