The choir sings praise music
and a great Halleluiah response
is crushed under the noise of a passing train.
Black and white photographs
(you'd really have to be there,
or read between the lines).
Smiling stills of spaces
between what had just happened,
and what was about to happen next,
taken with mum's Brownie camera
and put in a box where the years
twist and turn, pile and slide, in random order.
Street cars screech around corners
and clank down Cambridge Street,
Commonwealth Ave,
to the subway downtown,
weaving around the old neighborhoods,
by brick apartments
and rows of three decker houses,
the cobbler shop, the pizza place,
the penny candy store.
and that's how it was,
the depth and the height,
connected, interlocked,
syncopated rhythm of all of life.
Years fly by in colorful procession,
time wraps around itself
and life lives within itself,
and I live within life, within time.
This isn't deep time, just a short moment,
not important in any way, a series of nesting boxes,
and I still believe.
Kathleen Romana