The Melancholy of Maps

Spread before me, ancient and new,
Maps curl with tales both faded and true,
Each line and curve, each mountain pass,
Whispers of worlds I’ll never amass.

A worn atlas holds dreams untold,
Of coasts uncharted, cities of gold;
Here lie deserts, vast and warm,
And there, the cool embrace of storms.

Somewhere a temple stands in mist,
Where pilgrims kneel and stones are kissed,
Where I will never press my palms,
To feel the weight of prayerful psalms.

The map is honest, bare, and kind,
A patient guide to places blind;
Yet each traced river, every shore,
Marks paths I’ll walk perhaps no more.

For life itself, a compass worn,
Has drawn me roads both loved and scorned,
And though these charts my hands may hold,
My heart knows journeys left untold.

In dreaming, I was led astray
By promises of some faraway,
By cliffs and coves and secret towns
I’ll never walk as night drifts down.

Yet somewhere in these painted lands,
The roads are still, as soft as sand;
And though I linger, bound in place,
They’re free, unmarked by time or haste.

So may these maps in silence be,
Keepers of roads that wait for me,
Of lives unlived, of trails unseen,
Of places born within a dream.

For here they rest in gentle lore—
The melancholy of maps once more,
Of foreign lands and unknown seas,
That hold what might, but cannot, be.

- Khushi Kaul