In the Sepia Years by Gerard Smyth

… we look completely
different, completely the same
— Linda Pastan

Here they are in the beginning, in the sepia years.
The first progenitors who look ill-at-ease
in front of the Cyclops eye of the camera,
but still in this image that you hold to the light
you can recognise the resemblance
between those in the picture and your face
in the mirror that has kept a semblance
of the hereditary blueprint that still decrees
a body’s strength, a body’s weakness;
the shape of shoulders, the first neurosis.
With each new alliance the line continued,
the clan extended: cousins and siblings,
grandparents and grandchildren
carrying within them laws that were written
on the genesis-genes, in the sepia years.

From: Smyth, Gerard, ‘In the Sepia Years’ in Crannóg Magazine, 45, Summer 2017, p. 10.
(http://www.crannogmagazine.com/CRANN%C3%93G%2045%20summer%202017web.pdf)

Date: 2017

By: Gerard Smyth (1951- )