The Things You Cannot Capture

If it had been me taking the picture,
I would have stood for a long time,
just taking it in. The failed gypsum mine,
the boat, broken and dry on the river bed
that flows no longer. I would wonder
at the story that let to the abandonment
instead of pushing out to sea as the water receded.
Was it broken, holes in the hull?
Were the miners so broken themselves
that there was no more effort to give
to save anything or any one but themselves?
I have been there, in the depths of that kind of failure,
all I had given, nothing left; the strength once so part of me,
gone.

I would stand there with my camera.
Walking slowly around the craft,
the paint stripped by weather, time and neglect,
looking for the perfect angle to capture
the sense of loss, the abandoment,
and finally finding it, snap the shot,
Maybe twice to make sure I had capture it,
a perfect picture that does not begin to capture
what you really want to know,
what happened next?

Where did the survivors go? What did they do.
Did they heal or carry on to the next mine,
to the next adventure, the failure merely another watermark
in a life full of them. I would want to know their stories
that can not be captured here. Compare those stories to my own,
over a glass of ale by a warm fire. But they are not here.
They are only in your wonderings, and I am left
to capture what remains.

About this poem

The photograph is of an abandoned Gypsun mine in Norway, from a research team that was studying ice in the area in 2013. No single person was attributed to the image. Just “Research Team.”

So the poem is an imagining. But also about my affinity for the broken who have raised them selves from the worst of that brokenesss. And for my own journey. And my love of restoration. Poetry is never about one thing. Mostly it is about whatever emotion or memory it inspired in you

Tom