"Lost" by Mary Soon Lee, Frequent Contributor

Lost

Mary Soon Lee 

Each night, we travel a few leagues further

into the book in which I once lost myself,

or so some long-ago observer might have said

as I read it for the sixth or seventh or eighth time,

a solitary child who lost herself in books,

and this book most of all.

Your company is grand; you may well be

the best companion I have taken on this journey,

but I was never lonely when I read alone.

I walked behind Sam and Strider,

Gandalf and Gimli and Gollum, 

with Tolkien's hand upon my shoulder.  

This is not where I was lost,

but where I found myself.

Poet's Notes:  "The Lord of the Rings" is probably my favorite book. I first read it when I was nine years old, and re-read it many times as I was growing up. I read it aloud to my mother one summer; read it aloud​, years later, to my husband; read it to my first child, and then to my second child. It is one of those books that has become part of me.