there were days when your eyes
rebuilt the Pangea
so that I would be
closer to you
& smooth out the wrinkles
ironed onto your forehead
by the definition
of long distance
that you wanted to shorten
into the dream
of a deserted island
& me, the one
waiting for you in the waves.
I was raised to think big,
not vast
& the Mayan calendar pages
still turned, telling of time
unspent;
yet you looked at me
like I was Aztec gold
with secrets hidden beneath
layers of generations
shed onto your skin
when it melted into mine.
I could see that I was written
all over you like a treasure map,
so I knew
exactly how you felt -
though instead of an X,
several question marks drew
the places you thought
I might be.
lost like a buried civilization,
I told you that if you found
a piece of Atlantis,
I would love you.
(you wanted some act of bravery
to prove yourself worthy,
knowing not
that I loved you already.)
Author notes
Inspiration for TI:
Atlantis. Some have proposed that it was related to Mayan and Aztec cultures. Also, with the Pangea, I used that image to back up the world time-wise, since it's a theory on how the continents started and that distorts the perspective of space/distance.
A contest entry
- Critiques by Melissa Gayle.
1650 points, ended September 4, 2008, 24 entries
• next poem in this contest, remove from contest
Comments
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I would play around with the stanzas a bit, I think some can be longer to help the flow of the piece.
Otherwise very nice. -
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thank you.
I'll look into that. something was definitely feeling off in this piece for me but I wasn't quite sure what, so I'll play around with that and see if it helps. 
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I was really into this piece, especially when you used the map metaphor. I've felt like that with people before, like in order to understand them, you have to figure out seperate pieces of them and put them together, in order to get the treasure.
*sighs*
You have such a bomb way of capturing things Christina, and you've just indented it into the readers emotions with this piece. Don't let that go...
I loved the ending two... we sometimes feel as though we need to act a certain way for somebody to like us, but it'd be so refreshing if we found someone who did for that.... um, true us? Not sure how to put it without cheese.
Again, a full piece, I can really feel your feelings in it. Awesome work Christina.
(show this to your parents, haha)
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