Sam Gardiner: No thing looks us up in books

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There are things we need words for,
like enamel jug, buttercups, crusty loaf, 

and things we don't, such as love, 

subatomic particles, that shooting star,

and there are words we need things for, God,

for example, ghosts, the verse in universe.

But nothing needs words for us,

no thing looks us up in books and thinks,

How interesting, I must look out for one.

       -- Northern Irish poet Sam Gardiner (1936- ), in The New Irish Poets (2004), ed. Selina Guinness