PAPER CHILDREN

Trapping a moment,

a heartbeat of time

is preserved in sepia.

The photos stand in rows,

opening doors to the past.

Walking inside their world

through the dusty barrier,

the snowflakes fall

like the heavy words

in a foreign tongue.

All together for the last time,

they sit in borrowed clothes,

as stiff as the screen behind them

as their bewildered gazes

are transmuted into history.

Pulled away by love,

the girl writes from Amerikeh

in a language she is forgetting.

Her mother an imagined guest

at her black and white wedding.

The son goes abroad to study

and never makes it back.

Quietly marrying out,

he translates Blaustein to Brooks

and sends his likeness home instead.

Drowning under the flow of time,

the mother sits in a country

now called Poland,

holding her paper children to her,

oblivious to the gale of war

waiting to scatter them.