Center
I used to think the street
in front of our house went on
forever, I believed it went
to the edge of town
and continued a few miles
and then turned into a dirt road
that sliced through the wheatfields
and cattle ranches and crossed
another road precisely every mile
eventually crossing over
the mountains I only half believed in
until it reached the ocean
that I’d heard of but never seen.
Our world lay on an east-west
axis so I thought it was
the same in any direction.
There I stood at the center of the world.
©2023 Gregory Luce All rights reserved.
Gregory Luce, author of Signs of Small Grace, Drinking Weather, Memory and Desire, Tile, and Riffs & Improvisations, has published widely in print and online. He is the 2014 Larry Neal Award winner for adult poetry, given by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. In addition to poetry, he writes a monthly column on the arts for Scene4 Magazine. He is retired from National Geographic, works as a volunteer writing tutor/mentor for 826DC, and lives in Arlington, VA.