A Poem a Day (601): Waiting

 
Waiting 

Black and white faces,
a campaign in the eighties,
on pristine cardboard wrappings,
stare out from cartons of milk,
the stuff that nourished them in infancy.
 
Here, they look out at us, no longer erased
from view, invisible, but present at our table,
and we are hopeful.
 
Disappearances are marked in numbers,
birthdays reduced to five. Two names:
the first and the last. So few characters to
represent a person. The missing. The unfound.
The ones who may still be out there, waiting,
their stories incomplete, the news items unwritten.
 
We wait for recognition, to notice one face
sitting in a window, crossing a busy street,
or just a fleeting look from a passing car.
We notice all the vehicles with their hazards on.
 
They wait, and we wait, and the time is endless
in the interim. They’re printing a new design today:
this face is only eight years old, one month missing.
 
The waiting drift past in the supermarket,
unable to acknowledge those eyes, while we read
all the details silently to ourselves, place the carton
in our basket, join the quiet hunt, hopeful
we might see them sometime somewhere
among the many faces we encounter every day.
 
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, August 28, 2023