Mirror Image

Who is the person
reflected in my mirror
over the past 77 years?

First me
then my mother
then my grandmother.

A reflection first of youth,
then lines
deepening into cracks.

It took me a minute to write the poem but two plus hours of sorting through 160,000 photos in my photo file to find photos to use with it. I never did find the actual photo I wanted to use. So goes life. It is true that a few years ago I started to see my mother instead of me when I looked in the mirror. Recently, it is my grandmother’s deeper wrinkles I see.

• • • W³ poetry prompt

      For this week’s W³ prompt, Tia offers us the following guidelines:

      • Theme: The bittersweet, painful, or unsettling aspects of the past and its hold on the present;
        • Optional Challenge: Use imagery of shadows, cracks, or reflections to add depth to the theme;
      • Form: A “square” (e.g., 2×2, 3×3, 4×4, or any other pattern you choose);
        • “Rows” represent stanzas;
        • “Columns” represent the number of lines in each stanza;
          • For example: 3×3 = 3 stanzas of 3 lines each; and 4×4 = 4 stanzas of 4 lines each.

Having trouble posting as WP seems to have killed the Classic Editor and I am not, after 13 years of blogging, able to do what I want to do to post this blog. WHY HAVE THEY NEEDED TO CHANGE EVERY SINGLE APP I USE THIS YEAR? IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY!!!

The day started out with an amazing display of the egg-creacking skill of Isidro, who cracked 16 eggs with a single-hand technique and dropped only one bit of eggshell into the bowl!!! Yesterday, as you recall, I was dropping 4 or more tiny eggshell triangles with every egg I cracked. He learned his technique in an Aptos, CA restaurant kitchen and it is still serving him well! Brad was the chef with eggs cooked with tiny pieces of garbanzos, cheese, ham, salami and I know not what else. Delicious. Plus a breakfast tossed lettuce salad. Odd but good. Later we had to drive to Melaque to pay Isidro’s income tax at the bank. Then to lunch on the beach where we were told we were sitting at a rental table and if we wanted to order from the restaurant, we needed to move back to the restaurant section. We never did figure this out as we saw him delivering meals to all of those “rental tables.” Another Mexican Mystery. Then home to walks on the beach, hammock-hanging, a few games of dice and then hammock-talking in the dark under the palapa with waves in the background…Venus shining huge in the black sky. Paradise. Now in bed at 11:30 telling you all about it!