No Photographer

 

I guess I’m no photographer. I tried

to take a picture (a paltry ambition,

this desire to take, bag trophies, hide

behind the lens), but the thing that I wished

for wasn’t a thing at all. I got beauty

as glimpsed through a porthole, but that’s not

how it looked from the crow’s nest, where the view

was limitless. If my camera caught

a trick of the light, it was just by accident —

the light was alive and elusive.

Where was the oceanic swell, the gentle

rolling of the sea? I got the fact

but not the feel, and no hint of the dues

I’d paid to get there, or what it all meant.

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Brattleboro, Vermont

May 2021

 

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