AGAINST THE BRIGHTNESS OF TIME

She doesn't know
she has a year left

... to live.

She is a photograph
shielding her eyes

against the brightness
of Time.

She is looking into the Future
to see if she can see me.

She has not been introduced
to her Death(as yet)    

but it...knows her.

She will never see
this photograph

that holds her so
tenderly

as if it loved her.

It comes from
an undeveloped roll

left over in a dusty
back drawer

that only came to light
years later.

An unknown roll
that gave birth

to these photos

that now stand
in the photo frames

of those who had
loved her.

She looks
back at me

now in disbelief

that she has
become

just this photo

a little scrap
of memory

caught on the barbwire
of Time

struggling
in my mind

to break free

her voice
(stealing through Time)    

still asking
the question:

'Do you love
me...? '

I telling
the photograph:

'I do! '

*

AGAINST THE BRIGHTNESS OF TIME

You smile back at me
not realising you are
only a photo.

*
These two poems are two years apart in time.  The haiku was the original and existed in itself for all that time. That's all I wanted to say...or rather that's all I could say. Now the haiku has acted as a seedling and manifested the blossoming of the thought...one is the seed...the other the flowering.

Most story-telling poems can be shrunk down to the essence of a haiku so the process works both ways. Why it should go one way or the other at the time...no one knows...least of all me! I like it when this happens because you come in at a different angle to the emotional world of the poem and the whole terrain is different. It is the best of both worlds because you can see the road not taken.

Both poems are a journey and an experience that inform me with what they have found out as they wandered around my mind.  They bring back different gifts and different signs.

I often lose poems and end up re-writing them only to find the original again and so am left with two different viewpoints of the same situation. It always surprises me how differently I deal with them as I move through time.  I also may just return and return to the same moment again and again in a poem as I try to understand it myself.

When I write a poem...I don't know where I am going to end up myself or know the answer that the poem searched for...the poem is always an other question searching out another question.