What are memories?
Echoes from another time.
Vistas to the past.
Captured memories
Faces staring back at me
From scrapbook pages.
Memories connect
Who I was to who I am
Without them I’m lost.
Do memories die?
No brain keeping them alive?
Perhaps not say I.
Maybe vibrations
Sight unseen to naked eyes
Echoes across time.
(What is a Senyru? Both in English and Japanese, a Senryu is very similar structurally to haikus. In English, we expect them to have a 5-7-5 syllable structure split across three lines. While Senryu poems aren’t nearly as popular in the west as haikus, which seem to have taken the world by storm, they are growing in popularity as more and more writers and scholars dig into the vast, untapped potential of adapting Japanese forms into English.)