Bending over the map on the floor
that unfolds like a rare carpet
we trace our trip with warm, stumbling fingers.
Sometimes we link them as our hands pass
over landmasses hanging in the blue, dreaming
of spicy meals, the coldness of a church,
lovers in trains, and new words for cursing them.
Travellers begin by stirring from their beds
Like peninsulas roving from the shore.
They haul their viscera over the oceans,
packing themselves like bottled fruit, holding steady
under the protean gaze of foreigners.
Friends from birth, we will fight
and make up, change borders and dialects,
while the rock roots of earth hold us down.