In a Photograph

Small fingers flutter goodbyes
smiles
shiny shoes,
first important days
- in a photograph,
held in my mother’s hand.

Square sandwiches in lunch wrap - with crusts,
maroon and white checks
plaits and ribbons
- all important I’m told.

Memories are lifted with trepidaceous reverence
from the shoebox filled with advertisements of my childhood -
reflections of a life seen through eyes which look like my own
although I don’t recall
the brushing out of tangled dreams into beautiful patterned braids
woven from chestnut strands with auburn flints
attenuated by black and white images.

I glance to the frames on our walls -
a montage of our own children
with their smiles
and scooters with whiskered wheels which crumple over gravel,
and smeared on elbows
trails of grey skid tracks transferred on to lips by kisses.

Hats and fishing rods and tangled nests of line
hugging wading ankles which disappear
into the unexpected laughter of the sea,
subsiding
leaving clothes adhering like the amniotic sack on a newborn calf
shivering comforted - cocooned in a soft towel.
Chocolate cake mixture licked and smeared on fingers and faces -
ceremonial markings of triumph over the challenge for the beaters.
Puddle pools - bare fleshed freedom
hosed with the strobe of splashes drawing butterflies in the sky
and there,
momentarily paralysing breath and time -
feet in shiny shoes.