Sorting through an old box of photographs is a nostalgia rush
This week, while renovating her home, poet and artist Frieda Hughes is reunited with family snapshots that trigger memories of her late parents
PHOTOGRAPHS
Repurposing a room is like moving home, furniture in the hallway
Waits for the carpet to be re-cut to accommodate
New shelves, empty cupboards and vacant drawers.
Enthusiastic, I pull files, books and folders out of storage
And from beneath the stairs to fill these new spaces.
Into this freedom I drag my many boxes of photographs.
Nostalgia hits me with the pillowy cushion of my history,
Images of love and curiosity remembering what I’ve left behind.
My mother emerges from my knowledge of her death
Sweetly smiling as if she were in the next room, waiting,
With her young face on. And my father, lost in thought
To the sounds of whale song, as he once was when my brother
Lived and laughed and fished Alaskan rivers. Long-dead friends
Wave and pose, while those left living are trapped in youth
Even as their ageing selves race towards death.
This new room is like a mirror of my mind
As it becomes the library of my memories in which
Underestimated snapshots of picnics, beach walks or parties
Direct ley lines through the landscape of my lifetime
That come to rest here, now, and mean something.