by 2021 Poetry contributor Carolyn Martin
Stories from National Geographic have often inspired my poems including the one published in the 2021 edition.
"Warning" was prompted by a statement in Jodi Cobb's article, "Strange Reflections" (March 2019), which I used as the poem's epigraph:
When confronted with the limits of the known world,
a 16th-century European cartographer inscribed the warning
"Here Be Dragons" on a small copper globe. Beware: What lies
beyond is unexplored--and perilous.
"Warning" begins with the challenge to find a vantage point high enough to see the horizon where we can ". . . wait for flames four legs/ a scaly frame. . ."
It ends, however, with the realization that the perils in this century are not unexplored dragons, but they lie in realities ". . . like love/and loss grief and regret prejudice and hate . . ." These are "lurking nearby" in the "world-at-hand" and need to be explored.
Here's another poem prompted by the National Geographic and links to poems recently published in The Phare, One Art, and The Headline Review.
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Carolyn Martin is a lover of gardening and snorkeling, feral cats and backyard birds, writing and photography. Her poems have appeared in more than 130 journals throughout North America, Australia, and the UK. She is the poetry editor of Kosmos Quarterly: journal for global transformation. Find out more at Carolyn's website.
Enjoy Carolyn Martin's "Warning" and other fine Poetry,
Prose Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction
in Bacopa Literary Review 2021
