The Reach

He lays a map upon the table
fingering their long journey
from the smudge of home
and stabs red-lined borders
that thread like arteries over the creases.
He does not want his children to forget.

 

His touch finds the place
they should now call home–
this wound on the paper
where their healing can begin
and where every voyage taken
gives promise of a new life.

 

Yet his head harbors lists
reluctant to recede, grievances
as infinite as time passing in foreign tongues,
remembered losses that may still break him
and an ache for the land left hungry and alone,
withering into a sort of history.

 

This is their future now, reached
by the single span of a hand across a map.
He will pleat his sorrow into its folds,
pocketing the past in that place
where every road must surely lead
and only the persistent heart can finally know.

 

Lynda Tavakoli has the good fortune to spend half the year in Northern Ireland (where she was born) and the other half in the Middle East. She is author of two novels and a short story anthology but is presently working towards her debut poetry collection. Her poems have been widely published in Europe and further afield, having most recently been translated into Farsi, her husband’s native tongue.
Willawaw Journal

Share
Published by
Willawaw Journal

Recent Posts

Notes from the Editor

Dear Reader, Who knew that a can-can dancer from the posters of Toulouse Lautrec would…

4 weeks ago

Rick Adang

Eternal Return A crocus from the rotting flesh of a hedgehog, placed with the pansies…

4 weeks ago

Shawn Aveningo-Sanders

Full Moon at Montmartre Claudette’s a can-can girl high-kickin’ it under the red windmill. She…

4 weeks ago

Frank Babcock

In the Light of Peace --painting by Bruce King of the Oneida Nation The travelers…

4 weeks ago

Louise Cary Barden

A Quad of Golden Shovels Internal Conversation at the beginning of Winter Wet and beautiful…

4 weeks ago