Atlas

My World Atlas calls from the bottom shelf.
A weighty volume, it stretches my muscles..

My fingertips can trace the wrinkles of mountains,
the unending ranges of Rockies and Andes,
the snowy peaks of Himalayas
that I once viewed from from India..

They can warm on the dry, dusty, deserts
of Arabia, Arizona and Sahara.

I can follow the competing surging floods
of Amazon, Nile and Mississippi Missouri rivers,
touch the tinkling trickles of Thames and Tiber

The Seven Seas, washing a hundred shores,
would swallow my whole hands.
Lakes and seas are bathed in azure..

A page speaks to me of how, eons ago,
Brazil nestled into West Africa,
when Gondwanaland and Pangaea were united continents.
Then slowly, silently as a snail, split apart,
with the oceans flooded between them.

There's no showing fronds of forests sheltering their beasts
or the waving, herd-nurturing grasslands of prairie and plain

but, turning a page, I see nations outlined and named.
Towns and cities are marked by overgrown full stops
within their borders, on continents and islands.
But, I cannot tell of the multitudes.that dwell there.
My atlas needs words to explain
how peoples inhabit these physical forms and features
of our fascinating planet.

November 2023