Photo Project Revisited

Back in February I posted about a new sequence of poems I was writing that concerned photographs from my childhood, both real and imagined. I had a flurry of writing these poems and then, as often happens, I got distracted by other topics and stopped writing them for a few months. While I was having an editing session a few weeks ago I revisited some of them and this led to me being inspired to write a few more.

I often seem to work like this. Occasionally I will write a sequence pretty much all in one go over a few days or weeks, but other times I will find I write a sequence that I leave alone for a while but keep coming back to. My prose poem sequence about the religious family was written like this - I have written quite a few poems in the same voice (that of a youngish girl) over the space of several years. Sometimes I think I am finished with it and a few weeks later will find another poem in her voice clamouring to get out.

My photographic series seems to be working in much the same way. I become bored with it or lose momentum and leave it for a while, and suddenly weeks later something will spark a memory that leads to another poem.

This is the latest one in the sequence - this is an imagined photo of a real incident.

Visit

This is the estranged aunt
who arrives out of the blue
with Easter eggs in a fancy vase
and a cuddly rabbit,
this is her at the kitchen table
in her fur coat drinking tea,
this is how you loved the rabbit
by pulling out his whiskers,
this is the aunt leaving in a taxi
before your dad gets home.