Map, Ode, Metaphor
Posted: October 8, 2015 | Author: April | Filed under: Blogging, Road Trips, Writing | Tags: #writing201, driving, maps, metaphor, ode, road |10 CommentsI remember when we met at first:
You lay easy on the rack; uncursed
Standing tall, proud, smooth, and glossy
The black wire rack near the self-serve coffee.
Remember when we left that town?
You were flat and smooth, your edges down.
The car was warm, the car was dry
And you and I, we learned to fly.
Your crinkling would break the silence
I’d fold you carefully, never with violence.
My finger traced tracks along your planes
And my love for cartography never wanes.
How far to Milwaukee? I’d ask, and you’d say:
Six hours and a quarter, if we go this way.
But detours were nice in their own sense of being,
I learned miles and the clock weren’t always so agreeing.
I miss you often; I long for you so–
I never imagined how soon you would go.
TomTom and Google, they just aren’t the same
We would travel forever; the road was a game.
An entire generation has grown up this way
Without real maps to guide them on the roads of today
I’m glad that we had an amazing experience
And traveled the highways, nearly no interference.
Very nice ode and to be honest I love maps! While one of my trip I turned off the GPS because it didn’t navigate us good and we used then only the paper map for the next 5000 km 🙂
Yay! I took a ton of road trips in the 90s and wore out a few maps on the way.
This is great! Clever subject, successful rhymes. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Amanda!
Love a map! Only took issue to one once, it did not specify the passes that required snow chains, but I do believe it expected me to be a bit more local than I was…. Maps are fun ☺️
I don’t even know how to drive with snow chains–like is it just drive normally? I’m such a southerner.
I’m gonna be completely honest, it was my first time out west, traveling from Provo to Flagstaff and there was this mountain pass, they stopped me saying snow chains, I said I don’t have those and I’m in college, is there another way, and I took the two hour detour…I was scurrying my little butt back to the Carolinas a few months later… Lol still don’t understand snow chains myself, except to know they’re a thing…
As a map-lover,I found this ode to a map utterly satisfying.
Then my work here is done properly.
[…] Two days ago, on paper maps. […]