After my sons grew up and moved away,
a globe of the world, cradled in its caliper,
remained high up on a shelf in their room,
where it had been already for many years.
Rounder than we know the earth to be,
the globe marks boundaries that have since dissolved,
while the colors that denote those stitched-together places,
remain bright, if arbitrary, except the green-blue seas.
So much about a globe is obvious, so much obscure,
and yet reaching up to take it down to pack away
I see, smaller than a child’s thumb, the light bulb
that from the hollow center made their dark room glow
and their hands, the size of continents, turned translucent
when they palmed the planet to make it spin.
Copyright © 2025 by Michael Collier. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
