SamadhiMuse

         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 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 —