poem from the road

weekly poem | there is no map for that / no map for our lives

Welcome back to A Poem A Week! I wrote this poem on the road, in bits and pieces. I later edited it in longhand when the electricity was out, and now I’m uploading it to Substack from a fairly spotty mobile hotspot. This poem has lived many lives! And has finally made it to you in one piece; I think there’s something special about that. That sense of a journey, which is also what the poem is about. Let’s begin.

poem from the road

The sky is whole and uninterrupted. From here on, there is only highway and the vast land on either side. Rolling fields dotted by brambly green and slow grazing cattle. A sun-struck blue and everything below it. No way to move but ahead. Behind us, the dirt roads and forking paths that brought us here fade into something fictive. Something forgotten. We are going elsewhere. To a place where we will be other people on the white sand. Other people under a white sun. Someone, somewhere. You study the map that will take us there. I study the small creases that fan out from the corner of your eyes. There is no map for that. No map for our lives. We know this as we roll the windows down and take in the last of the evening. This evening, where the pink clouds darken like dying roses. Where the lights on the highway come on all at once, and for a breath of time, we are free. Above the thread of the horizon, flocks of birds fly homewards - following those other paths in the sky. Half-way there. Here a deep rumbling carries us forward: wind, road, radio static. I close my eyes to the sound and drop into an old, earthen silence. Long minutes pass by. When you wake me up, it’s already dark. You point at the moon. An enormous gibbous moon sits cold and yellow above us, hanging like a pale, still fruit. Looking up from the fumes of a passing dream, I can almost reach up and swallow the moon, almost tear through the satiny fabric of the night. How I long to peel back the sky and find the light beneath; the one that pours through the pinpricks of the dark. Soon we will reach. The place we are looking for. But for now the road stretches. As long as the night. As wide as everything yet to happen. We are always just arriving, we are just a turn away.

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I’ll be back with new writing (and a better internet connection) next week.

Love,

Anagha