At the end of October, my poem “Stellar Cartography” was featured in Verandah #39, the Literary & Arts Journal of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. One contract stipulation was that they would maintain copyright for the first year, after which it would revert to me. So, while I can’t post the entire poem here until November 2025, there are a couple things I can post. [edited 28 December 2025] The poem, slightly modified from the Verandah #39 publication, appears at the bottom of this post.
[edited 22 August 2025] I had hoped to include the quotation below as an epigram with the poem, but had not researched permissions at the time and Verandah opted to not go forward with it. I have since contacted Mr. Turchi and obtained permission to use the epigram in future publications of the poem. (Thank you, sir!!!)
To ask for a map is to say,
“Tell me a story.”
—Peter Turchi
The quotation comes from Turchi’s book Maps of the Imagination. It’s one of those books that when I find a copy at a used bookstore, I buy it to pass along to a friend who hasn’t read it yet. It’s a wonderful book.
Also, on their Facebook page, Verandah is posting medallions with excerpts from the works appearing in Issue 39. This is mine:
Stellar Cartography
“To ask for a map is to say,
“Tell me a story.”
—Peter Turchi
I.
Grandmother
pointed to the glinting sky
as embers sparkled
and sparked
in the waning fire:
the gods, heroes, monsters
of her family, her kin,
chronicled
with the whys and hows
they became so.
II.
While shadowfaced figures
read in Stonehenge
their solstice script
indecipherable, translationless
with today’s lexicon,
Kalypso set The Odyssey
on course,
advising the oft-turned man
to keep the Pleiades ever leftward
as he sailed for home.
Centuries later, Magellan
piloted the seas
as he plotted the sky,
transcribing what he read there,
charting history,
and Galileo found in the heavens
narratives at odds with holy writ,
as have diviners of natal charts:
biographies bound and determined,
wanting only interpretation.
III.
We, though, too modern,
too old for bedtime tales
and second-stars-to-the-right
but no less
needy,
needing to be folded
into the stories
of Orion, Cassiopeia, Draco
(no, not that one),
the Big Dipper—
“I prefer the Great Bear,”
you say,
“seeking her wandered-off cub.”
Our arms reach up, fingers
stretch, tracing the outer rim
of the dipper’s bowl,
up, up, till they cross paths
with the pole star.
My hand finds itself in yours
as banked embers blaze up once again.
© 2024, 2025; first appeared in print at Verandah #39, October 31, 2024