Wednesday Poem: Compass by K.A. Brace

They say true North attracts
Madmen, suicides, and dreamers,
Whose dreams make too much noise
In the next room.
But, all their instruments point
To something they call magnetic
Where physicists turn to astrology,
Psychiatrists alchemy and
Mathematicians the divination
Of bones for inspiration
–As though the past
Were a continual horizon
And tables and charts alone
Report the day as it is.

They never tell us that yesterday
The sky ignited, or today
The clouds lumber across the scape
Like children draining into adulthood,
Forgetting to receive the light by habit
As a familiar companion, not shrinking from
Nor welcoming its texture, forgetting
It makes no interpretations
And that there is no way now to say
As to which way true North was.

***

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