The cartographer arrived after dusk,
his satchel swollen with unfinished weather.
He unrolled a map upon the kitchen table
where rivers wandered beyond their names,
where mountains drifted nightly in their sleep.
"You have drawn this wrong," said the widow.
He smiled.
"No land is ever where it believes itself to be."
Outside, rain rehearsed its ancient language
upon the roof's attentive skin.
The mapmaker dipped his pen into darkness
and sketched another valley between two heartbeats.
All night he worked.
At dawn, the widow discovered
that the road to her grief had vanished,
replaced by a footpath winding gently
toward a meadow she had forgotten existed.
The cartographer was gone.
Only the map remained,
and on its farthest edge, in careful ink:
There are countries within you
that no empire has measured.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
On the verge of sleep,
the map dissolves into fog,
the cartographer steps backward
into the throat of the unfamiliar.
He carries no lantern,
only the burden of his own curiosity~
a compass spun from silence,
a hunger stitched into his ribs.
The trees whisper in languages
he almost remembers.
The wind paints equations
on the backs of his eyelids.
He does not seek answers.
Only the echo of the question
as it unravels him,
thread by thread,
until he is nothing
but the space between stars.
I am a world traveller.
I am a reputable cartographer and explorer.
I grand-fathered Google Maps.
Wordku: 5-7-5 words
AP: 3rd place 2025
There are millions of stars
Those are just the ones we can see
But there are many more
Lost to time and the universe
Each one is a long-lost dream
Or a love which went missing
However, at one time, they shone brightly
But there is a single man A
A cartographer of the stars
He listens to ancient echoes
Tracing invisible constellations
Having his life’s mission ahead of him
He tries to preserve what time tried to erase
Something mankind doesn’t know it needs
© Poem – XV/VIII/MMXXV
LRET
He drew maps for a living—
not of roads, but of promises.
Soft lines where her laughter once lived,
tiny arrows where her eyes used to point
when she couldn’t say stay.
She was the sea—
ever folding into herself,
a hymn of salt and leaving.
No harbor could hold her,
no anchor dared ask.
He traced her tides in silence,
built cartographies of could-have-beens,
and marked in inkless ink:
here be ghosts.
She tried, once,
to live on land,
to breathe stillness,
to fold her waves into windows.
But the sea is not a creature meant for ceilings.
So she left—
and the world kept spinning
in the wrong direction.
In some other verse,
some bend of time,
she learns to stay,
he forgets to wait.
But the ending, like gravity,
refuses to rewrite itself.
Every love story has a map.
Theirs had no destination.
Only a compass
that spun
and spun
and spun.
--
April 2024
M-ysterious
A-spect
Y-ields
G-reat
U-nknown,
M-using
A-bstract
R-ealm's
O-utline
©bfa053025
Monocrostic (Birthday of May L. Gumaro)
Located where, is Heaven, on these maps?
Cleverly hidden in Epitaphs?
Perchance in Stars seen from afar-
Or buried with Captain Cook, perhaps?
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