Grainy black and whites
Fading, magenta, old color ones
Frozen in time
Faces and places
That I have spent my life
Trying to animate.
Like Doctor Frankenstein
I try to breathe life
into the long dead.
The corners curl in awkward scrapbooks
The nameless faces behind the glass
The sepia tones of the photo flapper and her mate
Encircled in a broken locket
With a picture of their firstborn.
I’ve always listened to the stories
Even the ones I wasn’t supposed to hear,
Things that only made sense
years later.
I want to know them, to interview them,
But almost all died before I came.
So listening is what I did.
And now, before it goes,
I write their lives, their stories.
Because in discovering,
Uncovering,
Recovering them,
I find myself,
my purpose.
I am quite literally a part of them.
They are my heritage;
This is my legacy.
The stories are all I have.
(c)Lydia A. Schultz
1 comment
Comments feed for this article
May 9, 2009 at 10:10 AM
Narendra
it’s actually true that we hardly know so many so many photographs that are there in our homes since ages…your poem actually made me think..what if i didn’t have my parents around me to tell me whom i am looking at?
brilliant poem…i love these lines “I write their lives, their stories.
Because in discovering,
Uncovering,
Recovering them,
I find myself,
my purpose.”
thanks