This month I would like to share with you a poem that I wrote last year but thanks to some help and inspiration from another poet, I worked on it again and submitted it to a poetry competition and was one of twelve commended poets. The poem is about my mother’s old camera and the memories it captured or in some cases, didn’t capture.

Box Brownie

I came across my mother’s old box Brownie

in an exhibition of cameras that I viewed.

Already ancient when she last used it,

to take pictures of our lives so long ago.

Snippets of my sister’s and my early childhood,

holidays and pets faded in a dog-eared past

of eight lost years when it stopped working

blank canvas of memories we never knew.

Those innocent days seem resigned to history,

Like the Brownie on the shelf, circa 1950.

Apart from a small newspaper I produced at school which only ran to one edition, poetry was my first real experience of writing as a young teenager and in some ways, one of my first loves.

The last time I had any such encouragement with my poetry was when I was published in the book below: –

My poems, ‘The Holy Spirit’s Creed’ and ‘Easter Haiku’ being sandwiched between Charles Wesley and Robert Bridges! It is still available on amazon.co.uk as a kindle edition at just 99p https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=Stones+before+the+Ocean or from lulu.com as a paperback for £5.20 including vat. (published 2017)