Category: Words

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From a Red Fort Window, Taj Mahal, Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

The Beautiful Remarkable Thing

You see a thing
A million times
A beautiful thing
A remarkable thing

It becomes a familiar thing
The thing we’ve all seen
In the same way
Photographed from the same spot

And so you go there
And when you take the photograph
You stand in the same spot
And take the same photograph

And damn if it ain’t as beautiful
As you’ve been told it was all these years
As beautiful as all the photographs
Taken from the same damn spot

And so you say to yourself
Yep. Been there
Done the beautiful thing
Seen and photo’d the remarkable thing

So you leave
And there’s some time
So you go to another thing
And the other thing’s pretty cool too

But then…
Then you see something
Some new other thing
Through a window in the cool thing

So you go up to the window
To get better look at this new other thing
And it takes you a minute
‘Cause you’ve never seen this new other thing

And it’s absolutely magnificent
And you wonder, just for a second
Where it was, all along
How’d everyone miss this exquisite thing

Before you realize
It’s the beautiful thing
The Remarkable thing
Seen from a different place

And it just blows your mind

I mean
I think the beautiful remarkable thing
Is even more beautiful, more remarkable
When seen from this different place

But everyone’s hung up
On the one place
The perfect place
For seeing the beautiful remarkable thing

So that’s how everyone sees it

And, yes
This poem is a metaphor
But what’s more important
Is finally seeing the beautiful remarkable thing

As if for the very first time

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Three Mates and an Interloper, Mathura Junction in 1600th Time, Mathura Junction Railway Station, Uttar Pradesh, India

Three Mates and an Interloper

My train speeds through the station
Camera lens pressed to the window
Short staccato shutter bursts
Seeking moments and frames

In one second
Three frames
Find three mates
And an interloper

This image the best
From the middle frame
Captured in 1/16,000th of a second

Then… they’re gone forever

In that moment now the past
Scarce opportunity for impressions
Too little time, even
To register more than a glimpse
Of form and tone

Years later
I shape the RAW data into a photograph
Meanwhile my mind lingers
With a ridiculously brief moment
Captured by glass, sensor and silicon

Allow the words to come
That shape stories
From the raw material
Of images
Collected from
Stories I’ll never know

With my muse ephemera
I rewrite history
To serve the present
Then offer a gift
To eternity

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Waiting for the Train, From the New Delhi to Agra Express Train, Uttar Pradesh, India

Waiting

We wait
This cold wet morning
For a train that is never on time

Huddled and swaddled
Against the chill
The platform
Covered from the rainy mist
But the breeze bites
Even through the blankets

In a mood neither bleak nor hopeful
But resolute and assured
For while the train is late
It is all but inevitable
And will take us from here
To somewhere else

Where somewhere else
May be work
Or home
Or family or friends
Somewhere we’ll find
Something we need
Or let go of something we don’t

Perhaps the only value
Of waiting here
Is to be able to step off
Somewhere else
Somewhere that is not here

And
For the moment
That is enough