Uses For a Globe {poetry for lent}

Veronica Toth is another creative writing student at Taylor whom I've gotten to know recently.  This poem won first place in Parnassus, our undergraduate journal of creative work. Her note explains: "We live in a big, beautiful world, and sometimes I want to kick myself for trying to shelve it." Amen to that.


Uses For a Globe
by Veronica Toth

Imagine what you could do
with a hollow world.
You could crack it open
with a big walnut-sheller
right down the equator
and eat ice cream from each hemisphere.
You could stick a helium pump
straight through Antarctica
and bat it back and forth
over a net in the backyard.
You might light tiny tealights
and place them inside,
hang the world like a Chinese lantern
on a tree bough
and enjoy the way that Europe looks
when it's glowing from within.
You could bowl with your fingers spread
from Jamaica to Ontario;
you could shake slips of fate inside
just like a Magic 8 Ball
and draw from a slit sliced due north;
at the end, cut it into melon slices
and gnaw on the dark blue rind.

Or, I suppose,
it could be juiced, wrung out,
hung up to dry,
and set upon a bronze neck;
spun idly once in a while
to dust off the Pacific.