Poetry Tulip

on reading news about mapmakers who erased
Poetry Tulip, Georgia from the maps in 2006

 

Poetry Tulip along with other
towns like Dewy Rose, Sharp Top
and Experiment are too small 
for today’s twisted atlas of the world.
Be gone, the mapmaker in her office
decides one blue morning 
as she palms her pink eraser 
or glides her cursor across a 
swath of land in Georgia making
the towns disappear from her vision. 
Whoever heard of a town called Sharp Top?
And Poetry Tulip just clutters up the page.

Tell that to the birds who still read Poetry 
Tulip on their flight onward to other places 
or to the boy and his sister on their way to school
holding hands and kicking through piles of leaves 
on a dusty path along the road below as they look up 
and she asks him if the flock of birds above will sleep 
tonight in the airy trees of Sharp Top or vanish 
somewhere between Dewy Rose and Experiment.