Into the Light, A Photographer’s Journey

Old and blind but in love with light, he’d reach for the hands of friends to guide him back to bygone landscapes, once the subject of his photographs.

Often he’d reimagine how hard it was to interpret it just right, and now felt sad but free of such weights.

Then, it was a last fleeting cloud on a lake he’d let carry him into darkness. Breaking sounds of autumn’s crunch he’d leave a pond to compose, rustling the stream of reflected images. The panicked flight of frightened grouse; he’d allow the dry leaves and grasses to recapture them in golden yield; his freedom.

Even in the crimson awakening of an evening, he’d wedge himself, coiling into a ball without twilight ever lessening him. The man would swim in the fog and its very question was a longed-for answer.

Further, than any poet, his thirsty shadows licked up the ground. All this revisited in the waning days of a ninth decade by the pond, and an inlet pictured by its love affair with the sky.

When the watchman of the moonlight came to wash his darkening window, a heavy mist now presented disappearing worlds through closing shutters, often his hand would reach for larger apertures on his old camera, and the creator’s intent became the subject of his complaint.

But the ancient brush of the Divine artist was dipped in a cloudy sea, and the lighthouse he’d eagerly ascended exposed to him sceneries of celestial luminance. The blind photographer now having completed his assignment receded into the landscape, understanding, and now traced the vast horizon of unchained glory that he could once only imagine.