An hour can be so long.
And even a minute.
And yet the years stretch behind us,
gathering.
And here they lie before me
with all their days and hours; each lived.
Their births, marriages, children and deaths
one after the other; again and again.
I find myself pulled through time
to the coal fields of Eastern Pennsylvania
and the farms and dirt roads
where they all lived.
Rising and falling,
naming their children and passing their years.
And each with a life
as rich and full of feeling as mine.
I slot them here, one after the other, in their lives; come and gone
and nothing is left of them – save for a few photocopies
of old hand-written ledgers and some grainy photos
of faces who never saw a telephone or a light bulb.
And yet, in these pictures,
their eyes shine bright
with the light of a day, now forever gone,
but so clear and real to them … then.
And even after all this sifting through their lives
and dwelling on their passings,
my own mortality still, somehow,
remains, to me, just a possibility.
Gallagher
25Sep23
Christchurch