Celebrating National Poetry Month with Poems About Photographs

April 29, 2020 Kat Kiernan

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Don’t Take Pictures presents a selection of poems about photographs.

Old Photographs
Gabeba Baderoon

On my desk is a photograph of you
taken by the woman who loved you then.

In some photos her shadow falls
in the foreground. In this one,
her body is not that far from yours.

Did you hold your head that way
because she loved it?

She is not invisible, not
my enemy,
nor even the past.
I think
I love the things she loved.

Of all your old photographs, I wanted
this one for its becoming. I think
you were starting
to turn your head a little,
your eyes looking slightly to the side

Was this the beginning of leaving?

Photograph and Yellow Tulips
Dannie Abse

A little nearer please. And a little nearer
we move to the window, to the polished table.
Objects become professional: mannequins preening
themselves before an audience. Only the tulips
interrogate the camera with yellow oaths.

Smile please. And so we smile. Pose that
never was, time that could never be! And
the long-necked tulips sinuous out of the vase
bend over the polished table entranced
by their own puffed and smudgy reflections.

Hold it. Our two smiling faces caught
on a branch of silence consider shy vacancy.
Soon the tulips, like yellow swans, will
dip their heads into the polished table
frightening us, and so we turn truly smiling.

Thank you. And later, next year or after,
we shall hold it, this most sad witness,
and smile please and come a little nearer
to a time that was never twice, to a place
that could never be thanked enough, so that

now never again may we see such tulips
as tulips, but rather as effulgent swans
sailing through a yellow interior of air
where faces and fantasies will be caught forever
in that black coffin dearly carrying us.

Photographs
Ivor Gurney

(To Two Scots Lads)

Lying in dug-outs, joking idly, wearily;
Watching the candle guttering in the draught;
Hearing the great shells go high over us, eerily
Singing; how often have I turned over, and laughed

With pity and pride, photographs of all colours,
All sizes, subjects: khaki brothers in France;
Or mother's faces worn with countless dolours;
Or girls whose eyes were challenging and must dance,

Though in a picture only, a common cheap
Ill-taken card; and children—frozen, some
(Babies) waiting on Dicky-bird to peep
Out of the handkerchief that is his home

(But he's so shy!). And some with bright looks, calling
Delight across the miles of land and sea,
That not the dread of barrage suddenly falling
Could quite blot out—not mud nor lethargy.

Smiles and triumphant careless laughter. O
The pain of them, wide Earth's most sacred things!
Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow
Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings.

But once—O why did he keep that bitter token
Of a dead Love?—that boy, who, suddenly moved,
Showed me, his eyes wet, his low talk broken,
A girl who better had not been beloved.

A Blurry Photograph
Martha Ronk

The tree azalea overwhelms the evening with its scent,
defining everything and the endless fields.

Walking away, suddenly, it slices off and is gone.

The visible object blurs open in front of you,
the outline of a branch folds back into itself, then clarifies—just as
you turn away—

and the glass hardens into glass

as you go about taking care of things abstractedly
one thing shelved after another, as if they were already in the
past,

needing nothing from you until, smashing itself on the tile floor,
the present cracks open the aftermath of itself.