Photo: Na’ama Yehuda
For the gate from the old
Must stand guard
Not by sword
But to hold
Off the passage of years
So the lessons of past
May find ways to
Be cast.
For Cee’s Black &White Photo Challenge: Fences and Gates
At The Gate
History
Fitting In
Photo: Philip Coons
Are they starting?
Oh, hold on!
You most certainly
Belong.
They did not invite
Your kin,
But I’m tall —
I’ll lift you
In.
After all,
Without us there,
History won’t be going
Anywhere.
For the Weekly Photo Challenge: Something that doesn’t belong
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Merry-Go-Round
Photo prompt © Jean L. Hays
“Used to be a zoo,” Ol’ Joe stuffed his cheek full of chewing tobacco. No frowning from Mama could make him give it up.
I gazed at the empty parking lot. We kept the market open by sheer willpower and another mortgage.
Mama often argued it was money down the drain, but Pops would shake his head. “History is a merry-go-round, Penny. It’ll come back. We just have to hang in there a little longer.”
Then the two of them would look at Ol’ Joe, and I knew: closing the business would kill him. Grandpop’s life was tied into Route 66.
For Rochelle’s Friday Fictioneers
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Layer By Layer
Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
Layer by layer
They go back
In time,
Descending through eras
They can carefully
Climb.
What whispers
What stories
Does the wadi
Impart?
Will their souls see
The footprints
These rocks know
By heart?
For the Tuesday Photo Challenge: Layer
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Salted
Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
In the cracked curl
Of earth
Baked in sun
And ancient salt,
The Dead Sea
Awaits a
Flawed flow of
Redemption,
Or a whitened end.
For Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Texture
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Zēngzǔfù’s Bridge
Photo: pngtree.com
He had made the pilgrimage as promised. He didn’t know if he believed the ancestors would know he’d kept his word, but life was complicated enough without angering spirits, ancestral or not.
And it would have made his mother happy to know he’d visited the bridge his great-great-great-great-grand (or however many generations it was) had helped build. She’d always longed to make the trip back herself, and couldn’t.
“The sweat of your ancestor dripped into the stones,” his mother had told him, “his blood and thus yours lives in them.”
He heard her voice in Jia’s when the child, sober in pigtails and pink frilly dress, studied the structure. “So this is where we came from?”
He nodded.
His daughter walked to the first pile and touched it reverently. “Zēngzǔfù built this one,” the six-year-old stated. “Nǎinai told me. She showed me in my dream last night.”
For What Pegman Saw: Jaingxi province of China
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Flatiron Renaissance
Photo: Inge Vandormael
Where Broadway
Meets fifth
In triangular happenstance,
Stands a Beaux-Arts building
That Flat-Ironed
A vertical Palazzo
Into a steel framed
Renaissance.
For Cee’s Black & White Photo: Made by humans
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Frozen In Time
Photo: Ofir Asif
They stand frozen in time.
Carving long blunted by
Wind and the loss of names
No one is left
To own,
Decode,
Or understand.
They stand frozen in time.
The saplings reaching up
To the heavens
The only sign of what
Even death cannot
Disband.
For the Sunday Stills challenge: Frozen
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Fates and Faiths
Photo: Osnat Halperin-Barlev
In the depths of the city
Where new rubs shoulders
With old,
Uncounted passes of prayers
And woven statements
Enfold,
Fates and faiths of what’s been
And may yet find
Better ways
To be told.
For Wits-End Weekend Photo Challenge: repeating patterns
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The Vanishing Point
Photo: Ofir Asif
At the vanishing point
They have passed
To be gassed,
Leaving us
To a world
That forever now must,
Not forget
How the place
Of no return
Has been crossed,
And we none are
The same
For hate’s shadow’s
Been cast.
In the name of those
Vanished
Who shall not be forgot,
We can vow to hold hope,
And let compassion
Outlast.
For Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week Challenge: Vanishing Point
Na'ama Yehuda 
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