offspring's purview

offspring's purview

 

I used have a globe

(when I was a kid

all those states

all those countries

and rivers and mountains) 

I would turn in my sleep

 

the spinning ball

bouncing off my dreams

of exploration

of finding some unnamed

island to call my own

 

but the more the globe spun

the more I realized

geography was for the adults

who had already found

those islands in their travels

 

and then returned to their cocktail parties

barely mentioning the occasion

as if they had merely stubbed their toes

on some beach that did not look familiar

in the alcoholic light.

 

 

erin-cilberto

3/8/25

Reviews

[Arundass TP]

Interesting way op presenting thoughts taking the subject geography. Loved this poem

[Nusquam Esse]

In Spanish there is an idiom, "Cada cabeza es un mundo'", that each mind is a world. Some people can travel the globe but internally they have never felt the world. Others are travelers of their world, with naught a concept of how immense yet bounded and small the earth is. Paradoxically, you cannot truly know the world without knowing yourself, or yourself without the world ... as ultimately, your self is more than just a voice in your skull. And it is when you stop placing a barrier between what the world and self is, that 'geography' regains it's allure.

[Lorry]

Ah, the wonder of youthful wonder, which I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out where atlas' hands held us in place and dreaming of going there and filling his hand with bird food to see if all those feathers would tickle him and the world into a wobble! 😃
We used to have a soccer ball like an atlas, it was to celebrate the 1978 world cup and had all the participating nations highlit in red. My brother through a dart at it and burst it. The dart landed on Brazil, so I knew they wouldn't win it!
😃

[Fabian G. Franklin]

Columbus sailed the ocean blue and left us very little to do... apparently. Well, we'll just have to invent our own worlds and let others discover them, eh? Tolkien had middle earth. Lewis had Narnia. We live in a kingdom of confusion grasping at flashing moments of lucidity like an Alzheimer's patient trying to regain that one moment when everything was clear and getting angry with ourselves when we can't figure out the magic trick. Maybe there isn't one and we need to let go into the flow to be reformed or reborn or reinvented. They say the meek will inherit the earth...But sometimes I think it's going to be pretty well trashed by the time they get it.

[K. Louis]

I love the nostalgic tone in this poem..especially the image of turning the globe in your sleep..it's a great metaphor for the passing of time and the loss of innocence. The way you explore the theme of lost childhood wonder and the idea that adults often become jaded is really compelling. The phrase, "barely mentioning the occasion as if they'd merely stubbed their toe" is fantastic.