Thanksgiving Week, Saturday

I am thankful for my childhood, in what is now a foreign land, a far country, for my adventuring parents who came to a place on the map where neither had ever been.  I am thankful for the memories I was given of the first river (though scarcely a trickle, until snowmelt gave it substance for a week or two), the first light.

All the Ivans dreaming of their villages 


all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities, 


picking up fragments of New World slowly, 


not knowing how to put them together nor how to join 


image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map 


made long before I was born shows ancient 


rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire 


for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages 


indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country 


remembers the first river, the first 


field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building, 


that new smell, and remembers 


the walls of the garden, the first light.

—from “A Map Of The Western Part Of The County Of Essex In England,” Denise Levertov 

image:  1513 World Map