Produced by Maine Poetry Central and Dennis Camire

This week’s poem by the late Henry Braun of Weld playfully explores how one can still feel like a newcomer despite living in our beloved state for 30 years.

 

Proceedings of the Photo Committee

Weld, Maine 1992

By Henry Braun

 

No one is smiling in these albums.

The photographer who invented “Smile!”

Had yet to enter the scene.

 

We are smiling, though, as we turn the heavy

Feltback pages, pages broad as leaves

Of rhubarb perennial in our garden.

 

I’m the newcomer, only thirty years

Since I triangulated the mountain,

The farmhouse and myself.

 

Back then I was too shy

To drop family photos in the time-capsule

That waits for us for 2062

Under the library lawn.

Will these elms return

By then? These stone-walled fields?

 

We gaze at the old houses, the big families

Stilled within their lives in the dooryards.

Christine, Newt, and Dorothy name names.

 

When I sing out “My house!”

They answer a capella

“Yes, that’s the Sanborn place.”   

It isn’t far in Maine

To the end of the past.

 

Dennis Camire can be reached at [email protected]