Glimpses Of A Personal History Poem by Len Webster

Who are these people I see in my photographs?
Their names have gone and were only briefly with me
Yet here they smile at me,
The pleasure of bygone summers in their eyes.
Some gave me an address,
Some exchanged a card at Christmas
Before oblivion swallowed them and clouds descended
To hide the beauty of our encounter.

From across the world they came, these faces,
To be tourists in a fantasy of sun and light
Captured and fixed in a moment
That has receded with the years
Now threatening to haunt me with question marks,
The only certainty the impossibility
That any of us can know another.


(1995,2011)