Snapshots

Snapshot

They are the only verticals
against the planes of shoreline, water, sky
– even the wind is horizontal. 

My daughter with her back to me,
hair streaming like the dune grasses
and her daughter running after, 

tiny fists pummelling
the element’s boisterous dog,
two foot of wilful energy 

making for the huge, new, open page
the sea.

 I can see it now — on the shore, my daughter and my granddaughter…she’s in a little blue cardigan running into the wind towards the sea. Did I actually take a picture? I don’t know. If I did I can’t find it.

You used to take snaps and stick them in a photograph album to bring out when the relatives came round. In a drawer at home I have one-and-a-half big, red, home made photograph albums. They begin with my grandparents in a strange fading yellow, then advance through the generations. My parents on their wedding day at the end of the war in Ceylon. Much later, my mother looking wistful by a hydrangea bush. Me and my sisters feeding pigeons in Trafalgar Square. And so through to our children…the three of them striking poses on rocks in the Peak District… and then their children and…. Well, then it stops, around the time they were toddlers. The stoppage coincides with my acquisition of a computer. Instead of going off to Boots to get my films developed I could load my snaps onto my laptop and file them away in neat digital albums. And my inbox is awash with photos of my various grandchildren sent through the ether. I put them in the appropriate folders and, I have to admit, rarely look at them again.

Most people now carry a camera with them at all times inside their indispensable smartphones and can be seen clicking away merrily at every opportunity. It is part of children’s social upbringing these days to learn how to pose obligingly for the camera. Whole tribes of relatives and friends can fit into your back pocket. It is strange to think of these unnumbered generations of smiling faces all somehow jostling around in that little fluffy cumulus lodged in the bottom corner of my computer.

One function of poetry is to take snapshots — an image in words to capture a moment. As with taking a photograph, it is an attempt to salvage an instant of time from the phantasmagoria of sights and sounds, desires and regrets, memories and fears which comprises the messy river of our daily lives. The poetic snapshot is both an act of rescue and recreation. Unlike a photograph it is made of words and words have different resonances for different people. They imply or suggest more than they describe.

There is a famous poem by the American poet, William Carlos Williams (1893-1963)

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Of course, we will all ‘see’ the wheelbarrow and the chickens through the lens of our own unique perspective, but the image is thrown tantalisingly into question by the ‘so much depends upon’ It queries how we look at things and how we value what we see.

And so I offer you a few more snapshots. Here is another featuring my granddaughter, Martha.

At White Sands 

…the brimming sea
flint-green and the weight of stone
heaves against a rim of bleached sand. 

Above the shivering dunes
wind-driven gulls hone their wings
to silver blades. 

A child among the rockpools
crouches over a mirror of still blue,
sees her own face shining back
and her finger closing in on itself. 

Out in the bay breakers gather and collapse.

These small poems do not attempt to tell a story or elaborate on intense emotions or ‘make a point’. I suppose what they do is catch the contingency of a moment, the way apparently random entities come together in a still point.

Buses and trains provide good positions from which to take poetic snapshots, the fleeting glimpses through the window giving time only for a quick click of the mental camera.

No Trains Due

no trains due
to engineering works
nevertheless
from the ‘replacement bus’
you can see
on Waverley Bridge
rhythms of rusting renaissance
arching along the parapet
florid with flaking paint 

and further out
down the grey stone canyons
of  London  Street
tiny classical pediments
cap the attic windows 

from one of which
a woman leans out
shakes loose her hair
and lights a cigarette

It is true that sometimes a scene carries a certain emotional pressure which finds its way into the poem. I used to wander around an area of wetland on the edge of the city. I would cross the bridge over the river and come to the canal. In summer the kids off the local estate would gather to smoke and drink and jump into the lock. One day the sight of them evoked a feeling of particular poignancy.

The Blue Bridge Revisited

Crossing the blue bridge
   you catch their raw voices
breaking the late afternoon
   with dares and curses, 

the children at the lock.
   You can see them stand on the edge,
look back – and jump,
   arms windmilling, plummet
      to a dark splash
Then surface on the stone slabs,
   glittering like fish.  

A girl wraps a shivering boy
   in a white towel, folds him tight.
Soon they will be aching
   away from their childhoods.

The past is like a series of such ‘stills’. Coloured beads threaded along life’s timeline, a glimmering archipelago breaking the surface of the tides and maelstroms of the sea-surge of experience. Some people keep a box of effects in the attic, mementos of peculiar significance, even if they have forgotten what it was. I end my collection of ‘snapshots with this…

The Kite

How, within the walls of a quiet room
in a narrow shaft of sunlight
you are sorting through a shoebox,
patient as the numbered days, and find 

an echoing shell, a newspaper cutting,
an envelope stuck down again,
that ice-grey stone you weigh in your palm,
and then the reel of twine, tight-twisted, tenuous, 

and find you are holding on, someone shouting
but the words gusting away, holding on
as the kite unwinds somewhere
between a flying sky and a green hill.