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Cartography
B. R. Strahan (bio)

(An address to the Rand McNally map on my wall)

We have this jigsaw human map
(a paint-by-numbers world)
and the true map
(multi-colored space-marble).

Shape changer but so very slow,
with her shifty cloud mask,
she shuns our game-board
shades etched with steel and blood.

While we lie trapped in make-believe
borders that block even our dreams
she surges with markless seas
and shifts the land beneath our feet.

Fish and fowl, flower and fruit
they have no maps but sense
her ever shifting weather,
madly prodded by our unreason

that never grasps that her seasons
are a thousand of our years,
this ever changing mottled face
we once saw briefly from far in space.

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