Two Poems for the Price of One

I have two poems to share as part of my One Poem Every Month for a Year project (which ends in November). The first one I started writing last month, as I watched my youngest son twist the corners of his favorite blanket over and over again, and the second poem I wrote just the other day. As my students were doing freewriting in the classroom, so was I and in the silence of our work, you could almost hear the echoes of stories and poems being undertaken in our minds.

On the Cartographer’s Map
(Sept. 2007)
Listen to the poem

This creeping cord
of tension slips
its knot
and moves as a snake to the heart
I’d fall apart
but the world needs
an Atlas to keep it balanced
(precarious as it is
and such a reluctant hero, burdened)
Always there is this sense of renewal
just around the bend
with outstretched hands waiting
to grab this globe and spin me free
on the cartographer’s canvas —
crisscrossed with longitude —
layered with latitude —
I am wondering all the while where the edge is
where I will fall off
and tumble into the nothingness.

Comfort Corners
(Sept. 2007)
Listen to the poem

He reaches for the corner, timeworn and faded
with fingers clenched tight
around the corner softened by tears and worry and cries,
as the comforter is dragged from room
to room to room as if it were a tail that could not come unattached.
His three-year-old eyes are intense
and anxious
as he moves from one corner
to the next corner
to the next
and he slips the fabric between
index and ring fingers — always, always, index and ring fingers —
and slowly twines the crux of blanket for a few seconds
in a gesture of relaxation before moving on to the next corner,
and I wonder, sitting here, watching him, as a father removed from sight:
what comfort does this movement bring to him
and how did he ever discover it?
But the boy just closes his eyes
and rests and there
in sleep,
the twisting and turning of his mind
continues, unabated and unresolved.

Peace (in poems),
Kevin

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