Erasing Colors

If I had a trowel in hand in this excavation site,
I could remove layers of history from these photographs,
to discover details I don't want to miss,
to preserve than dump them onto the spoil heap of memory.

Buried family artifacts, for example, this photo album
needed care uncovering from all the dust over it.
The stain of yellow pigments show signs of mud
that buried it after the flash floods subsided.

The sun came out today to dry up the mud
as it would bricks of an improvised tomb.
The government staff keeps tab of the numbers
of the dead,

but the tools for unearthing and the details they tell,
doesn't complete the picture nor fill the void
of the spaces from the album where once the images
of the father, the mother, and the children were

but the water erased the colors,
mixing it with the earth.