Photo Exhibition

A world, one frame after another, a face.

The lens steals its truth through focus, aperture,

each plane a face, flattened

with solemnity or grandeur, sexiness or grace,

craven or upright,

a world words cannot speak.

Tribal wars, evictions,

the daily life of slums.

Before a church, stars pose nude.

A tale of poison gas and Tokyo subways.

Their silence mocks the Wall Street crash.

Shadow weaves its threads across the light,

black, white, so many depths of grey.

How much can glass withstand?

Countless faces, none its own.

Without tricky composition

the lens can’t take it, leaping free

as if the mute camera remembers

years ago the crazed man

snapped leaping from a ledge.

No glass can match the pavement,

each sun-shattered

fragment one refraction,

a street of broken faces.