Shel Raphen's poem starts like a note jotted down on the steps of a library: two squirrel nests, one on each side of the entrance, perched on columns. Nothing happens and nothing is at stake. Within a few lines, though, the speaker has turned two heaps of twigs into the opening of a Shakespeare play. The poem is really about how imagination works. A person standing in front of a library can't help seeing the world through stories.
The poem has no title, only three asterisks, and that suits it. It reads like a thought caught mid-stroll rather than a finished statement. It is written in free verse, with no rhyme scheme and no steady beat. The first stanza is plain and observational: "On the left and right / On the corners, on columns." The repeated "On" gives the lines a neat symmetry, which matches the symmetry of an entrance with a nest on either side. The second stanza loosens into casual questions. "Do you think they're neighbors?" turns to the reader as if the speaker were nudging a friend. The joke about asking "to borrow a nut" puts squirrels into the everyday routine of borrowing sugar from next door. "Borrow" is also a library word, so the setting adds a quiet pun.
The hinge comes with "Or are they rivals." Here the language leaps up a register, borrowing from the prologue of *Romeo and Juliet*: "Two nests, both alike in dignity, / In fair Library, where we lay our scene." Raphen swaps Shakespeare's "households" for "nests" and Verona for "Library." The capital L turns the building into a city-state, a place worth fighting over. The next line, "From forth the fatal loins of these two foes," keeps Shakespeare's wording almost whole. Both of these lines also settle into ten syllables, so for a moment the loose free verse takes on the measured tread of the older poetry. Even the columns from the first stanza now look like stage scenery.
The funniest and most careful change is in the next line. Shakespeare's "star-cross'd lovers" become "star-cross'd kits," meaning young squirrels. Where the original announces that the lovers "take their life," Raphen has them "meet in dead of night." The tragedy is defused, and the grandest language in the poem ends up beside a pair of lovers "sharing acorns." That clash of high style and tiny subject is the poem's main comic engine. It also makes the squirrels oddly touching, since the poem doesn't mock them. The line stops on a dangling "and," as if the speaker's own sentence had scampered off, and then the next stanza opens on "Gossiping."
The gossip is the neatest turn. Romantic secrecy becomes chatter "about what the patrons are reading." The usual relationship is reversed: people come to the library to read, and now the squirrels are the critics, reviewing the humans' book choices. It fits that this drama is set at a library, a building full of other people's plots.
The last two lines bring in the theatre openly. "Cast in silhouettes" works two ways: squirrels cast as actors, and squirrels casting shadows. The shadow-play is "for me to see," and "me" is the first and only first-person word in the poem. The speaker has been the audience all along, and perhaps also the author of the show. A silhouette has no face and no speech, so the viewer has to supply the story. Judging by this image, the feuding families and secret lovers come as much from the speaker's mind as from the squirrels.
The poem matters because it shows, lightly, how literature leaves the page. Shakespeare appears here as a lens for seeing, not as a heavy classic. A reader who knows the prologue gets the extra pleasure of spotting the changes. A reader who doesn't can still enjoy the picture of squirrels borrowing nuts and trading book gossip. Either way, the poem suggests that stories live in the things we notice on an ordinary walk, once we are ready to cast them.