Our Brains Are An Atlas Of The Ways Of The World Poem by Patti Masterman

People want you to take them on a journey
With your words, with letters; a painting
For they are every day engaged in a battle
With the drudgery of existing,
And all they want to do is forget it for a little while.

There is a rumored even bigger forgetting,
But they are unsure if it is a real journey
Because no one has ever returned with any tales.

The moon also wants the sun to show it around
The solar system; the sun itself
Wants the galaxy to twirl it outward like a tether-ball.
The earth skates neatly around the sun,
But the ocean takes only small piggyback rides
Whenever the moon steps in closer, to dance.

A child tracks the sun across the heavens
Seeing it replaced every night by constellations,
And imagines all is turning
In a perfectly tight circle, around him.

But the traveler sees how the mountain
Has surreptitiously replaced the ocean bed,
And how huge boulders are transformed to gravel and rust,
And he supposes then that his steps will too
In time, be eradicated from every surface.

But he has to keep on journeying into the past,
He has to create connections with a future
Because each generation must prove to itself again
That the universe notices our presence and our doings,
And has a reason for placing us here as observers.

We are all the travelers of the journey
Within the larger journey called reality,
And perhaps reality can only remember
It's most minute movements, through us:
If we are the true recorders of whatever we pass by,
Our brains must be the atlas, of all the ways of the world.