Don Gray
Art Essays, Art Criticism & Poems
Strangers in Old Photographs ... A PoemI have reached life's stage of age in full decline, when looking back, I hardly identify myself and my companions in old photographs. What shockingly ancient creatures we have become. Time makes strangers of those we once were years ago. I see no one that I know, though I knew them well. Who are these so oddly young, eclipsed by shadow of old age from blocking, interstellar debris between the earth and sun of our luminous past? Was I ever young? Did I live another life as child, youth, man, like fruit fresh on the spring-time bough, flower, but a bud, all life ahead, now fallen; dry, wrinkled rot and decay? Even stars grow old, burn out, fade and die. All things do. We must know this. But fancy greatly differs from unsightly fact, hidden from consciousness, battened down, denied behind tightly-closed doors of the mind we rightly fear to knock upon, much less unlock...crack open... peer at reality's grim ghastliness -- escaped from detention by honored illusion – flaunting its nakedness behind never-used doors. My brothers, the things I loved in life...trees, birds, stones... would all look back, if they could, upon their lost youth -- like eons-buried cities, civilizations disappeared, silted under by indifferent time -- and wonder at what they were then, in face of what they are now, and will yet become. All life is lost. We are the living dead, alive for the moment, awaiting our destiny, disintegration; death and decay our destination...understand? Do not think to knock upon this locked and rotted door. Copyright by Don Gray
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