Glimpse

This post is a response to an April Poetry Month challenge issued by Mary Lee Hahn at her blog, Poetrepository. She found some family photos this summer at her home place and thought it would be fun to write poems about them this month. Carol Wilcox (Carol’s Corner) and Kevin Hodgson, (Kevin’s Meandering Mind) are writing some awesome poetry this month (as always) along with Mary Lee.

 

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Glimpse

Do you ever
catch sight of yourself
in a photo, say, one
from long ago
that you never could have
been in? You get a glimpse
of a life you never
got to live. So it was
you were flipping through some photos and,
like when the hall mirror
captures your image momentarily,
there you are. You’re not
the one in the background
jumping up to be noticed,
or the one striding
to meet the camera,
broad, confident smile on his face.

No, you’re the one standing,
head slightly tilted, curious,
apart from the others,
on the edge of the gathering noise.
You’re the absent one,
fondling a stone,
the one you picked up
alongside the road because
the sun lit up its mossy green streaks
and the black was deep
and mysterious.
You delight
in the smooth, cool
weight in your hand.

– Steve Peterson

 

Notes


I’m using images from the New York Public Library’s digital collection, in this case, another photo taken by Ben Shahn.1 Click on the image and you can learn more about where and when it was taken.

It has been fun to look through these old photos. When I came across this photo of kids loading onto the school bus in a small town in West Virginia in 1935, I did a double take. The expression on the face of the boy in the foreground is like so many on my face in photos from my past. I began to imagine a connection across the years.

  1. I talked more about his work in the an earlier post.

Published by

Steve Peterson

I teach fifth grade in Iowa.

6 thoughts on “Glimpse”

    1. Steve,
      I love this! I suspect that many of us who live the poetic (or semi-poetic) life, would describe ourselves as you do in the second stanza. I often find myself wondering at things no one else pays attention to. I think you have capture some big truth, here my friend.

      1. Yes, Carol. I suspect that we (poets and semi-poets or, in my case, faux-poets) do, by temperament or practice, look at the world in just a little bit different way. I think of Kevin’s “blue note” from one of his earlier poems, that note that does not match any other on the scale but rests there in a space between. Among and close…, but shifted ever so slightly off kilter, which is where the heart lives.

  1. My fingers
    only find the grooves
    along the surface of the stone
    I found off to the side
    of everyone else, that day.
    Whereas you saw it only
    as smooth and perfect,
    something to be collected,
    all I can feel is way the imperfect stone
    is indescribable to anyone
    but myself.

    –Kevin

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