Long Shadows… #Poetry
#photographs
#FlashFiction Challenge for Carrot Ranch Literary Community ~ #Poetry
July 1: Flash Fiction Challenge
July 1, 2021, prompt: In 99 words (no more, no less), write a story about “the old photograph.” What is captivating about it? Where did it come from? How does it incite a story? Go where the prompt leads!
Photos, snap shots of time
You hold the past in your hand
Old memories flood in
The thing with old photos is
They slip between the floor boards
Multiplying, boxes under beds
On top of wardrobes,
To be forgotten
Until the day, your granddaughter
shouts out, Gran, who is this?
That’s your grandfather.
Now you are worried
Is he in the box or the wardrobe?
Your first love, the one you never forget
The one that would upset the apple cart
Wrong name on the birth certificate
Would bring up too many questions.
How to tell the truth now?
© Anita Dawes 2021
#Whatdoyousee #Keepitalive
What do you see # 32- 1st June 2020
( The image shows an old-fashioned camera resting on a faded map. There are three photos in sepia print next to the camera)
Was it the best find ever?
My husband loves to rummage around boot sales
His passion, old cameras. He was in luck today
He found an old Zenith camera
Complete with a faded brown map
And three photographs.
I managed to spot Paris and Rome
couldn’t make out the third photo
Before my husband snatched up the box
Asked the lady how much and paid thirty pounds.
Without looking further, he decided it was time to go home
Luckily, I didn’t want to find a treasure of my own.
He drove us home, driving me mad at the same time
As he became a twelve-year-old, excited over a present
An aging aunt might have brought.
I had seen him flip the back of the camera open
the film roll inside might have something viable to print.
He thought the Russian Zenith and map could be from the forties
I knew where his mind had gone, 007 spy stories!
A couple of hours later, I found him slumped in his favourite armchair,
looking like an old tire with the air let out.
The prints were pegged on his line and heard myself say OMG.
The prints were very blue, exotic
Not the spy story he had been hoping for after all.
One of the old prints turned over under his lamp
had the beginnings of something written there
Could it be the spy story he had been hoping to find?
©anitadawes 2020
Anita Dawes and Jaye Marie 