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Flashlights

Chapter 18: PICTURES
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About This Book

A compact collection of lyric sketches, reflective poems, and stories in verse that illuminate fleeting moments of urban and domestic life. Through vignette-style pieces the author observes barbershops, cafés, and crowded public spaces, probing loneliness, social exchange, and quiet moral dilemmas. Other poems turn inward to meditate on longing, rest, and mortality, sometimes adopting epistolary or conversational forms. A concluding section offers narrative metres that compress human interactions into sharp dramatic scenes. Spare language, sensory detail, and shifts between irony and tenderness bind the sections into a mosaic of early twentieth-century moods and manners.

PICTURES

I saw a little boy go hurrying
Towards an old man nodding in the sun.
He tweaked him by the sleeve
And gazed at him with insistent frowning eyes
Asking his question.
The old man blinked and muttered
And the child let go his sleeve
And drooped and turned away.

I saw a mother counselling her daughter
About her lover, and the girl was sullen,
Looking from out averted eyes
For means to go to him;
And the mother bowed her head
And turned away.

I saw two lovers meet with hungry arms,
And kiss and speak and kiss again—
Then speak with challenging tones and fall apart.
I saw them turn with tightened lips made dumb
And eyes quick-quenched and dark.
Slowly they went their ways.

I saw a woman kneeling in a church,
Her head was bent upon worn hands
Clasped tightly.
Her dress was black and poor.
After a time she rose and shook her head,
Then beat her fist upon the rail
And clattered noisily down the aisle.
At the door she paused,
Narrowed her eyes at the holy water
And passed on.