by César Carlos Bustos
In an old, lost, dusty drawer
I found these very remote images
that nobody knows any longer
in their grayish violet ovals.
Who are these beings
that on a distant day held
perhaps a warm body
or an innocent gracefulness on earth?
Maybe they have never imagined
to be perpetuated in the emptiness of photography
and submissively stay there
still looking with astonished eyes, imprisoned
in gray cardboards, waiting for
who knows what in their steady postures
of dream and eternity.
Perhaps there were movings, fires, destructions,
and other misfortunes through the time.
But they are safe
they remain there, I do see them, they are the old anonymous stamps
with their hollow ashy glances.
It is useless now
to look back in the past,
to sink in the patience of evoking them
if as a child I used to see them
and they were already sad, ignored objects
that the family had left aside
at the bottom of remote attics.
That is why I feel that some day
they'll become dust without being noticed
and nothing will be left, nothing,
the same as these orphan words
that will soon be forgotten.