Sometimes you run across a fragment of a photo. Maybe in a thrift shop, maybe in your old photo album, maybe something that belonged to a family member.
I suppose, now that photography has gone mostly digital, this won’t happen as often as it used to. So if you’ve never had this experience, you’ll have to imagine it.
Today’s poem is a prose poem.
Puzzle Great-Grandmother
The picture, itself old, and the woman white-haired. Standing heavily on a cane. The undefined floral cotton day dress like those once so common, gray whether it was or not, hangs as if she were once heavier, hangs as if it willed her shoulders toward the ground. Behind her: a larger-than-life snowball bush. Though improbable, it too was real, though it stuns, like an outsized two-story rhododendron or a t-rex version of a gecko. It’s only half a photo, the woman in the middle, grayer than the white of the snowball blossoms that hang like glass ornaments & bend the branches of the bush that is behind her and to her right. On her left--everything is torn away. What person or child was unwanted, sent off? Or perhaps what's gone was wanted more, and this half-pic's the leavings. Which is more fragment--what goes or what stays?
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You only get a piece of the picture.
Something torn off, purposely or not, and something left behind. We think that’s unusual—but the ripped edge calls attention to what’s always true: we never get the whole picture. It’s just not possible to know everything. To know enough? Maybe, sometimes. But not everything.
I hope you’re enjoying National Poetry Month!