Flashback

A worn but artful trick of movie-makers:
colour for here and now, the present action,
but monochrome for times remembered. Fakers

who touch a nerve of truth. A slow subtraction
goes on; the film of memory runs forever
but loses, dropwise, year by year, some fraction

of its colour. Mind’s deep shadowed river
holds all the drowned selves of your existence.
But see them as they were when lived in? Never.

Maybe a flash: conjured by blind persistence
up to the sepia ripples and your shame,
with eyes of water from the deep-down distance,

appears a vivid child that bore your name,
drawn through the dark to meet what it became.

[Form: terza rima sonnet]