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‘Reality is where things happen’. So Michael Jackson writes in one of his poems, quoting...
Old Photos
They capture our likenesses, we like to say:
mates in shirtsleeves outside a coastal pub,
our great-grandparents on their wedding day.
Dated, liver-spotted, bent –
our photos and our flesh seem to contain
a single destiny: the image fades
As illness fastens on; her smile
belies her tragedy; cancer is killing him
like acid rain: a woman on a shingle
Beach alone, clutches her cardigan
with folded arms. I become
the camera viewing them
Between the calibrations and the flashing
red, the hairline fractures of the frame.
But if only they were less obedient
In their Sunday best, watching
the dicky-bird, saying cheese. If only
they weren’t so focused on the past.
I pan to the film of water at the ocean’s
edge where my children play –
shadows of themselves as the tide comes in.
I can’t believe their falls portend
the final fall, a Home, dementia, old age.
I take no photograph. Their voices are
Drowned by the breakers at the bar,
faces a blur in the spindrift. And the green-
blue waves unspool forever on Ocean Beach.
There are so many good poems in the Children's Archive, it's hard to know where to start! I'd like to share with you...
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