Family Album

Leaf 94 – Looking Back

 

This haiku was written in response to a #prompt on Bluesky to write a haiku using the word: ‘snapshot.’ The first thing which sprang to mind was all the times I have spent hours staring at old photographs in family albums of relatives who died before I was born. I have done a lot of research tracing my family tree, so these albums are always an endless source of fascination. Looking at those small images, bent and brittle, black and white, or fading sepia tints. Looking at the smiling faces of great grandfathers and great grandmothers especially, people who I am related to only a couple of generations back, but who I never met. Relatives whom my parents and grandparents knew and have told me about. People in whom I can see familiar likenesses; people whom I am clearly connected to; people whom I’m descended from. People who look directly out of those photos at me, but (I can’t help wondering) can they see me – so many, many decades later – staring back at them? … Apart, but I am a part of them; and them, they are a part of me. Sharing this (seen and unseen) connection. 

 

 

Unknown faces,

gazing into my soul

– snapshots in the family album.

 

 

 

Photograph credit: Pixabay