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Treatise on Maps

You need a map when you are lost.

When you are lost, you look at maps.

You look at a map when you don’t know where you are.

After you find the place where you are on the map,

you know where you are.

When you want to have a picture of where you are

have been, would like to go, you look at a map.

How do you make a map?

Well, a lot get made on cocktail napkins

using lines, dots, x’s and squares, mostly.

William Smith just started walking,

looking at rocks and fossils.

He drew it all out and coloured it in.

Then a bunch of rich guys ripped it off,

and that’s how geology got started.

That would be in England.

Kathy Prendergast spent an awful lot of time

drawing maps of capital cities with 9H pencils.

They’re beautiful. They’re in IMMA,

which is in Dublin.  But it’s not IMMA on the map—

it’s the Royal Hospital Kilmainham.

in Stand magazine, 7 (4) 2007