Epistle 2i Poem by Morgan Michaels

'Travel is broadening'
It's true what you've heard,
And opens the eyes in many exemplary ways.
For example, a couple years ago,
Sailing back comfortably by air
From Sicily or some such place
One cloudless, effortlessly blue, Spring day
Out the window seat in a cabin
Seatbelt loosely buckled,
Leafing through the travelogue of the month
I glanced eastward, waves below frothing
Toward the long, Italian peninsula,
Seat of so many receding wonders
Over black mountains and green forests
And umber-golden blocks of wheat and barley
Worthy of Breughel (either of them) and saw
What shock-IT!
IT, what? you might ask-
IT-the gently arching, rolling, running away
Curvature of the world,
Clear from this height
Dazzling, mind-blowing. And quite surprising,
Cantering horizon-ward, itself
Giving 'global' a fresh meaning.
'Ho hum, ' intoned the traveller on my left
Nose in the stock report
Who saw nothing and only
Wanted to get home to dinner
So he could leave again tomorrow on more business.
But I saw it, I saw it,
And thought of other wonders:
Spires of Napoli, Roma below
Genoa, Milano ahead:
Architecture, so visual, so brainy,
Masterpieces of town planning
Intent to preserve all
As integral to a whole.
Tearing down nothing;
Condoning the good
At the beating heart of things-
Opinions of things unseen
Mere self-referencing attitude;
Seeing not only believing,
It seems, but understanding,
And the act of seeing, further understanding:
The idea of curvature united with the physical fact;
Suddenly I thought a new thought,
'How cool, ' I thought,
That flat is really curved,
And that, seeing that wondrous, recurvant plain,
You can't really ever stand flat
On the whole, apparently flat earth, that is: Nope.
One foot must always rest higher than its fellow
If only by microns
Even if you wait a very long time
Expecting it to flatten,
Expecting it to change
It will never be so, by definition.
Curved apparently being too happy being curved to be flat:
Curved being more natural
Than too dull Flat;
After all-only champagne is flat.
Why, even the print
On the apparently flat page, the edged words
Are like hedge-rows to a gnat-
An alphabet-labyrinth
Much like Dutch dikes
Holding at bay seas of ignorance and treachery
Replete with punctuation, indentation,
Which the gnat must either circumvent or hurdle over;
Why, that even the Constitution, itself
Must seem to....