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Picture Perfect

The Final Paper
The Final frontier,
The last hurdle
Minutes before a famous victory
I'll recollect the exultation many a time, I think
and remember the expression on everybody's visage

The final bow
The one for keeps...
as papers go flying in the air.

Excitement gives way to euphoria
As bodies break into cold sweat;
and the voices go shrill

Faces turn blurry now
Yet the voices remain fresh...
Shrilly and piercing, a cry of joy celebrates the end
Of another step in life.

A hurdle bound to pale out to insignificance
in times to come

But the sketches are etched forever,
The faces may meet two scores later
with shades of joy and recognition of another kind.

Bodies may decay, faces spread out
The memory that comes back though
is the lasting image,
of goodbyes, adieu's and au revoir's.

Remarkable they seem later, theatrical, Beckketisque,
Pinter-like even, joyful nonetheless!
A momentary glimpse of 'all of us' together,
The moment that stuck, almost as if frozen in a time warp
or even a photograph!

Yet that's the moment which keeps coming back,
When days gone by are recalled.

We didn't have mobile phones with cameras
to remind us of those moments,
yet every megapixel remains
in some deep corner of the mind.

Wishing we'd got the Point and Shoot 35 mm's
the KB 10's, the Vivitars and the Minoltas
a Cannon or a Yashica if you were privileged
with film rolls that needed studios to get prints of,
negatives that were preserved, all 27 or 36 of them if you were lucky!
Just in case a friend asked for a copy...
None of us owned Polaroids then
They were too fancy for us!

I found a few strips today in an old shoe box, the negatives looking eerily familiar
And as i think of today's myriad photographers, toting a Digital SLR
and framing a perfect composition.

I wonder if they evoke the nostalgia of the perfect frame that wasn't captured?