Fading Photographs- By Michael D. McCombs
The crackle of ancient paper rustles through my mind,
Like parchment over handled, frayed breaking of age.
Tired and worn from the passage of years.
They were fresh once, in another place, in another time.
They carried the images of loved ones, of I once knew, caught forever;
or so I dreamed. The colors were bright and the focus just so.
Sharp for the things and soft for persons I had chosen to cast
Into the forever world in the cloister of my skull.
Little things mostly like a leaf in the spring or a flower in the snow.
They held the peal of the laughter and the thunder alike, safe for
tomorrow's thinking. There were some big things too, that counted for
more to me than all the springs that had passed behind me. Soft eyed
children, a grandmother's smile, the final passing of a friend.
The ones that seem most faded are of yet a third kind.
The ones that tell the story of a younger man, in an alien land,
fighting a war without end and not knowing why he does.
The sharpness is gone from the friends by the wire or on the berm;
the mountains beyond and the stars that shone in that foreign land
beyond a graying ocean. Good friends, too. Friends to die for and
with, or to die for you. Nametags faded beyond recall. The sound of
their voices covered by monsoon rains or incoming rounds.
Even the places are going: Kontum, Nha Trang, Pleiku, are simple blurs
on the paper that used to hold so much more. Even the tank has no
corners and the napalm burns only gray; tracers leaving lines without color.
And what of Weet, and Sarge, and all those who gave this strange place
a reason, however cryptic, for being at all? Pain and love and hate
and fear are all but gone. Only the strongest have survived the years
intact, or I think they are. The rawest hate and fear, unmitigated by
the lesser, the gentler things that made even these less horrible.
So I reach out, with my feeble hands and softly grab,
trying to save all of these that I want to keep so badly.
The fading photographs from my mind's own album.