JVD

It must have been during the First World War,
this gathering, my father’s family–
his parents, brothers, a couple of young
wives (but not his own, my mother, not yet
in the picture, not even met), two girls,
my cousins, one of them still a baby–
assembled there in that Midwestern room,
long since demolished, for a photograph.

How straight they hold themselves, the young men
in sober suits, the young shirt-waisted women
with not-yet ‘twenties hair piled on their heads
beside the older Father, the Mother,
in nineteenth-century moustache, in lace.
How self-assured they seeem to be, how strong,
how touchingly expectant, caught in that
one, fixed, fine, briefly collected moment.

Why do they move me now, meeting my eyes?
Their gaze is not without amusement, nor
is it lacking in sophistication,
but still an underlying innocence,
vulnerable, shows through and saddens me.
They do not know, of course, preserved so,
that death has taken them, all but the youngest,
leaving only their images behind.

They do not know, as I know, the lives
that lie in wait–cards intended for their hands,
fates to be inscribed upon their faces.
No way to tell them even if I would.
However they may stand and stare at it,
time will not be teased to revelation.
They cannot see ahead of them, as I do
looking back, the intervening years.