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 —