My Great Aunt Nell
         I’m time tripping in a very different way tonight.
         My Great Aunt Nell McGee was over for dinner
         and I pulled out the old boxes of photographs
         that I was never able to face
         after my mother passed away.
         Mixed there were my mother’s collection
         and my Great Aunt Mame’s.
         Things that ran from Rose and I, three years ago,
         to my Great Grand Parents;
         Pennsylvania farmers and Irish immigrants.
         Even now I sit among these beautiful people’s
         pictures, long gone.
         But when my Aunt was here, it was different.
         Through her eyes, I saw my mother at 17,
            young and fresh and pretty,
         and my Grandfather as a young blade,
            with wit and intelligence
               engraved so clearly on his face.
         I followed brothers and sisters
            throughu births and deaths;
               through first-hand knowledge
                  and through things just heard.
         She put names to faces fifty years gone
            and I felt them as they were.
         I saw my Father, briefly,
            some ghost image who came into
         and out of my Mother’s life
            in a camera’s blink of time.
         I saw myself, as little Chris is today,
            when my Grandfather was old
         and I saw my Grandfather’s youth
            with a rebel’s spirit
               so clearly on his face.
                        12 Mar 1983
                        San Juan Capistrano

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

         All these photograph faces swimming bye
            moments captured forever
         then…now.
            They laughed at the camera
         so alive, and yet so frail
            compared to these paper traces
               they’ve left.
         Each one I throw away hurts.
            I think, that with a motion,
         I may be disconnecting the last memory
            of someone.
         Someone who loved,
            whose blood flows in mine
         a lifetime of experiences
            gone now
               because no one remembers their name.
         I threw away a weathered envelope,
            circa 1920, whose contents had been lost
               in the photograph box’s general melee
         and I remember there was written on it
            ‘Via con Dios’ is someone’s handwriting.
                              12 Mar 1983
                              San Juan Capistrano

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

             Rosemary, my mother’s sister
         That all our small wishes and dreams
            be driven from the stage
               like sand before the storm.
         Should we hold the echoes or
            let them go?
         I feel grief when I read this child’s card,
            whose dead forty years,
               when she writes
                  she’ll be home soon
                     in a child’s scrawl.
         Barely done … and when I drop the card
            washed away forever.
            I threw the card away three times
               and took it back again.
                              12 Mar 1983
                              San Juan Capistrano

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

          – Rosemary, my mother’s sister -
         That all our small wishes and dreams
            be driven from the stage
               like sand before the storm.
         Should we hold the echos or
            let them go?
         I feel grief when I read this child’s card,
            whose dead forty years,
               when she writes
                  she’ll be home soon
                     in a child’s scrawl.
         Barely done … and when I drop the card
            washed away forever.
            I threw the card away three times
               and took it back again.
                              12 Mar 1983
                              San Juan Capistrano

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —