Snapshots
by Michael R. Burch

Here I scrawl extravagant rainbows.
And there you go, skipping your way to school.
And here we are, drifting apart
like untethered balloons.

Here I am, creating "art,"
chanting in shadows,
pale as the crinoline moon,
ignoring your face.

There you go,
in diaphanous lace,
making another man’s heart swoon.
Suddenly, unthinkably, here he is,
taking my place.

Published by Tucumcari Literary Review, Romantics Quarterly, Centrifugal Eye, Poetry Webring, Poetry Life & Times and The Eclectic Muse. Keywords/Tags: snapshot, picture, photograph, photo, album, memory, keepsake, remembrance, token, memento, art, replacement

One day I'll wake up to a different day,
as I bid farewell to my past.
I'll wake up to a different sky.
A beautiful day.

You'll see my eyes grin
as the warm sun kiss my face in joy,
And my hair dance to the tempo of the breeze.

You'll find me hop past the pink meadows like a merry child.
And then you'll see me run.
And I'll run as fast as I can,
like a firework in the sky,
rejoicing every stride towards freedom I take,
in this beautiful maze called life.

Chain smoking sadness, slapped by time.
Winter doesn't freeze the pain.
There was one thing that
Mom wanted more than
anything else in the world:
It was to have a
picture of her
seven kids all together,
in one place,
at one time.
There was an age
difference of
23 years between the
youngest to the oldest,
and 1000 miles separating us.

In December of 1987
two weeks before Christmas,
I held a picture of
the seven of us all together.
I put it in the
right front pocket of
her navy blue blazer.
After the funeral,
we buried her with it.

I was told to write about you,

    handing an empty sheet

of paper...

They asked how couldn't you
write a single line on how you
                                          love her.

"I said,

How can an essence ever be turned into
a language understood,
every one

                            is different.

Like a prism
       everyday is different
never the same.

Its like saying capture a storm
                                in a picture!

All you capture is the
                                  stillness.
Not the passion of the wind,
            
the voice of the rain,
             speaking to the ground.



"I asked them,

Capture your last breath ,
and tell me what words

you said...

How could I do that?

exactly, now tell me how to capture
                          her in words,

that'll do justice to how I feel about her...

When the jigsaw
had only two pieces
     to make a picture

and there were three?

You'll try put it in any hole it fits in..