July 2024
Bio Note: I am a Contributing Editor of MacQueen’s Quinterly. My work has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and “Best of the Net,” and has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Ekphrastic Review, Texas Poetry Assignment, and elsewhere. I have two chapbooks, Standing Inside the Web (Bear House Publishing), and Fire and Shadows (Legal Studies Forum). I am a retired law professor who has been writing poetry since I was sixteen.
What Simon Never Said
Everything looks worse in black and white.
—Paul Simon, "Kodachrome"
In school, the yearbooks
always call them candids—
snapshots that capture
people, not poses.
Sorting family
photos in a box, sifting
layers of pale pictures,
we try to trace the ages,
frame the faces
we still can see—sons
once gaped at the cat,
ran naked down the hall,
once shaved their heads,
grew their hair into long
babe magnets.
Simon sang in praise of
Kodachrome, how it
colors our memories.
But Simon never said
colors do not last,
never told us how quickly
colors lose their grip,
leave us with only
a box of fading—
ghosts that once
wore our faces, used
our names.
©2024 Gary S. Rosin
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to say what it is about the poem you like. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -JL