The Globe

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.

Credit

Copyright © 2025 by Michael Collier. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 6, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Globes are beautiful distortions of what we know. The world is [neither] round nor [are] countries defined by lines [nor] identified by colors. But they help us to imagine larger concepts and more precise relationships. This globe, a father-in-law’s gift to my first son, had an added distortion, an embellishment—a light inside that passed on the effect of its translucence through my children’s small hands. As a result, the globe became, for me, an object of supreme poignance, signifying the inevitable passing of time but also a vehicle for recalling the intense intimacy I feel for my two sons.” 
—Michael Collier