deepundergroundpoetry.com

Talking Pictures

"A word is worth a thousand pictures." - Ransom Riggs

I have no word to offer for my lost photographs.
Locked in a cedar chest that was taken when my home was foreclosed two years ago.
Those pictures are lost forever.
Hopefully will be found by someone as kind hearted as the author of the Peculiar Children stories,
And the books of talking photographs.
If pictures could talk.
Mine would be crying out.
Lots of them lost from moves.
From horrible people destroying my lives.
Lost in dissarry and broken from time.
Those memories, recordings of my life.
Gone-- In an instant.
No going back.
Pictures and scrapbooks, forever missing in the end.
Black and white images forever turned gray.
Lost in the dust of a large world.
That will never change.
So I hope picture can't really talk.
Because mine are crying out.
Forever lost.
Forever gone.

"Sometimes a word is worth a thousand pictures."

Money and power were the price people were willing to pay.
To remove my mother and I from our home and take our things.
Throw our pictures away as if they were nothing.
There is no word that can bring them back.
And there is no price that someone should be to lose their entire family history.
To a foreclosure and some eviction notices.
Those lives, those stories, those faces can never be returned.

And so for now I will mourn silently for the family members I will never get to see,
get to caption,
get to look at it.
And try to understand.

Talking pictures, turned mute.
My ears turn deaf to their cries in the night.

And there is nothing then anyone could say or do,
to make the loss of those missing pieces of my family's lives seem right.

I'll close the cover on this tale and bid theee goodnight.
For talking pictures have given me new appreciation for things.
Shining on them a new light.
I missed out on knowing a piece of my family's lives.
And it will always leave a sting.
Stolen fragments of my mind.
Broken pieces of my hearts.
Shattered pieces of my soul.
No word, not phrase, nor act of kindess.
Could ever bring back, those photos of people I have never known.
The photos.
That cedar chest.
The times.
The days.
The moments.
My grandparents.
My family.
Their lives.
And their homes.
Never, ever to be known.
By my eyes or my son's, or anyone else that is to come.

Talking pictures.
If pictures could talk, I wonder what mine would say?
They're probably out there crying somewhere, begging to be saved.