Pictures, Echo-refined

 for the ka-jillion times I've done this,

there are no photo-keepsakes, I remarked to Victoria yesterday,

Maybe we should have one to tuck into good-old-day archives

 ...'and so we take a closer look at common here-and-now'

which includes numb bum from the hard floor etc.😊

but sometimes book-looking needs to happen right where we are or 

we never do!

Its raw edges are smooth like stones washed by the sighing sea

The grace of years has brushed spent fears, like tears, from memory

And what had honed our hopes back then as dreams keened hunger’s gaze

Has forged the ups and downs of them into the good old days

Time, as it slips through our skin softens its yester-blow

And sweetens love’s incumbent growing pains of letting go

Then, while the winds of change insist upon time’s changeless ways

The gray and gold of have-and-hold soft-molds new good, old days

The aftermath of ordinary highs and lows becomes

A sort of path we wander in a world of tallied sums

It fills thought’s weathered pages with a tender hymn that plays

Across the modern ages of tomorrow’s good, old days

And so we take a closer look at common here-and-now

Soon turned to pages in a book that Past perfects somehow

While we grapple with ties that bind today’s momentous frays

Into pictures, echo-refined in Bygone’s good old days

© Janet Martin

This poem was written with a tender prayer included
for those whose good, old days really were the best before...
before sickness and death severed ties and altered pages forever!