poetry

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

Friday 25 October 2024 14:01 EDT
Family photographs –including unseen pictures of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – from Frieda Hughes’s personal album
Family photographs –including unseen pictures of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – from Frieda Hughes’s personal album (Frieda Hughes)

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.

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