A Photo at the Museum

 By Steven Wade Veatch

 

I see you in the fading photo looking back at me.

Evidence that shows you lived.

I wonder who you were, touching the world,

learning in a one-room school, following

a deer trail, and then working in a gold mine.

Nothing else mattered. Just years passing by.

You stepped into an unknowable darkness,

then you were gone, and your possessions disappeared—

one

by

one.

As your world collides with mine,

I ask:

What will I leave behind?

A yearbook, a photograph album, postcards, letters.

Will they go to a museum?

Or a dumpster?

Will they fill a cigar box?

I am lucky, I filled

someone’s heart.

A young miner in the Cripple Creek Mining District. Photo circa 1899. Courtesy of the Cripple Creek District Museum.