Mapping Memories
Mapping Memories - Amarjit Chandan
Mapping Memories
Imagine it is a paper.
Look at it.
It is a portrait of the earth.
See where the needle of your magnetic heart stops.
That’s it. That’s the place you always missed.
Put a dot.
Touch it with your finger tip. Softly.
It throbs.
Then put another, and then another till a line is formed –
The umbilical cord reconnecting.
The spot is the cartograph of your memories.
It is the wound healed.
A dot shines on the page
at the zero degree of all directions.
Here ends your returning.
You are home.
From 'The Long White Thread of Words: Poems for John Berger' (Smokestack Books, 2017). Recording used by kind permission of the BBC.