SamadhiMuse

                  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 —