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—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.
When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.
Look down you said: this was once a famine road.
I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in
1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.
Where they died, there the road ended
and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that
the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon
will not be there.
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Copyright © 2003-2008 Gunnar Bengtsson, Poetry Connection. All Rights Reserved.
As a frequent student of cartography and only an occasional reader of poetry, I can't help noticing the fascination that cartography and cartographic imagery have for contemporary poets, or at least cartography and its imagery as they imagine it to be. This poem is a good example of that. I enjoyed the piece and certainly felt the longing that it expresses. It does a somewhat better job of using cartography than many. I am curious, however, why there have been nearly 500 visitors to read the poem, presumably much more capable than I to comment on it as literature, and yet I am the first to even venture a few lines.
Mandraki from United States