Questions About Place

Can you ever really know a place?
You show up,
dwell in it for a short time
or long,
but you never know
its whole history.

What happened here
before-
a day ago,
a decade,
a century,
a millennium?

If you are perfectly still
for a very long time,
can you feel its past
whisper across your senses?
Is the memory stored somewhere
in the collective unconscious?

Or is that only your imagination,
your ownness
filling up the space?

It is a mystery
and now that you have come
to occupy this place,
you have become a part
of everything that went before,
a part of the mystery.

Someday,
in a hundred years
or a thousand,
someone may come here
and wonder-
who was here before?
And the mystery of you
may whisper
across their senses.

By Maria Brady-Smith
Photo by Mike Smith