A bird’s eye view

As I was cleaning my home,
my eyes glanced at a folded
piece of paper. I opened it.
A Map. Of the world,
in my hand. I made it lie,
in front of me.
Index, colour codes,
other clues.

An old one; that, which
helped me learn my lessons
of history and geography;
it felt strange, irrelevant lands, painful stories, ancient sadness,
thoughtless madness,
enduring hues.

Numerous scratches and scars,
bruised the world; countries,
with borders, boundaries.
What have we done, I mused,
I imagined homes; many homes,
gardens, giggles, dreams,
demolished, scarlet screams
of families smashed to smithereens
to fulfil the greed
of the few.

Truths unfolded before me,
in time, the piece of land we
call world had developed
scores of added divisions,
newer dissensions; I was a little
bemused, for my thought
as a pupil didn’t change much;
even then, it was much easier to
memorize the names of the
mountains, the oceans, the
forests, and the rivers than
to cram those man-made
pack of lies, those territories
violated, abused.

I folded the map of the world
back in its place, the old world,
I just saw with a bird’s
eye view.

 

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Dodgem

This I like. To me you have nailed the incongruity of world maps showing the historical/political so-called reality; while the actual world is a shared geography. Imagine, two politicians, one French and one British, casually drawing lines on a map to decide the fate of millions of people? Madness – sheer madness!