I feel bad for not posting anything yesterday like I had intended. So yay–two-for-one!

I wrote this poem earlier this year shortly after completing the companion piece to “Twelve [The End].” You’ll also notice that the poem’s titular character sounds familiar…yes, it is the same Magellan Lange from The Reckoning. It reads similar to the verse the Lady in White is writing in Part Two (coming next week!).

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“Magellan” 

To whom it may concern
(The first stanza gives it away) 

In our history, he is the man with the map
Who always knows the way,
Who knows where the danger lurks
And the road best not to take. 

He came into view with a discerning scope
And revealed the sky with its moving lights;
What beauty lies there in the unknown!
To be constrained is a deplorable plight. 

Nightly, she had wished for a guide to reveal
Exotic paths of which she had feared
Needlessly, almost with irrational fervor
That left her from exploration sheared. 

By Selene’s light, she peered from her fortified tower,
Mind roving about in imagined spaces;
How excited was she when the course veered
And cannily intersected with his traveling graces. 

The stories he told she could barely fathom;
The world he held in his palm to her was rare,
And she could not contain her fascination
As he pioneered her emergence with greatest care. 

But simple and singular was this, in odd fashion
For she found she could have ventured on her own;
However in his presence she was sheltered
In a way that assured she could be grown. 

So their history was drawn, his and hers,
With lines jagged, curved, intersecting, and parallel
Places of interest dotted, each a mini-metropolis
To where visits are often and in shadows memories dwell. 

A picture in time of a landscape in constant change;
He was able to capture the transformation—
This slightly deficient world expanded at his behest
And her growing wisdom was his confirmation. 

This shrewd work of expansion and artful rearrange
Is signed with one name: Magellan Lange.