Forgive me if I captured too many photographs
Of the boughs laden with blossoms, the potential for promise
Of the fruit of the broken clippings, taking root in foreign soil

The beauty was in the foreground when I captured you

Crowned by the gifted cherry blossoms
Cloaked in a warm spring’s blue sky
Adorned by branches bearing pink and white hues
Framed by political legends and monuments
As you should be

You are my American Dream

I found you there beneath the cherry blossoms
The clippings of our broken lives finding new ground
Potential for promise in the fingers laced together
From foreign to familiar in two seasons

Where the horizon intersects the Washington Monument
Casting its reflection toward us in the tidal basin              
You saw me through the lens of a Canon
The pictures give me away
In a sea of bodies all seeking beauty
I saw only you, in moments, in seconds untold

Fame and fortune do not tempt me
A little imagination alters the photographs

In thirty years, we sit beneath the cherry blossoms
Reading Tolkien or Chesterton aloud
Season after season of beauty in the blossoms
Of beauty in us

written March 28, 2016

In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m posting a poem a day in April. Poetry can be a way of capturing a moment in time, much like a photograph, and when you revisit that memory, you’re seeing what was once and what now is simultaneously.