Up until a few years ago, I was a poetry writing machine. Somehow finding the love of my life ruined all that…apparently I was all very tortured and angsty until I met my future husband! I refuse to believe that happiness is the death of my art, so I’m trying to get back to writing poetry again on a regular basis. I think this was the last full poem I wrote before the dry spell, for a writing challenge I was participating in. I thought of it tonight when I was thinking of how I should visit my grandmother, who is now in a nursing home. I miss her clarity so much…she always told the best stories from when she was growing up.
Sepia
The photographs were faded
My grandmother called them
Sepia and I touched them
Wondering how cameras could
Lose their color
She smiled, her unlined face
Still and silent under my
Fingertips
My grandfather’s ghost looking
Over our shoulders and
Remembering his youth
The pictures were more than
Just stories, they were epics
That traced the outline of my
Past with a jazz music
Soundtrack and an
eight pattern beat
I move to their music, from
Benny Goodman’s clarinet and
Trace the same grooves in the
Floor with my feet and I
Am dancing with ghosts
Never alone in this room
Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
The Host: A Novel
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Buccaneers (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
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