The failure of love might account for most of the suffering in the world.
The girl was going over her global studies homework
in the air where she drew the map with her finger
touching the Gobi desert,
the Plateau of Tiber in front of her,
and looking through her transparent map backwards
I did suddenly see,
how her left is my right, and for a moment I understood.
Copyright © 2016 by Marie Howe. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 27, 2016, by the Academy of American Poets.