There's a photograph
by
Mike Crowl
There's a photograph taken of me when I was still a youngish man - thirty - still a new father, and I'm standing in the garden of our rented ramshackle house - with floors that slanted away from each other and a hall that ran down to the kitchen, and an outside toilet where you sat and saw the stars - and I'm dressed, at my wife's behest, in the uniform supplied by the Post Office (from some depot in Waikikamukau or possibly Timbuktu): a jacket too short and shorts too long, bloomers extending down to the knees, and my hair, in the fashion of the day, (just before men reverted to short and neat) is down to my shoulders - I'm all hair - with a beard that covers much of my face and glasses that cover my eyes, and I'm grinning at the camera and the absurdity of the clothes which my wife would shortly after alter to a non-schoolboy-of-the-forties look.
The sun shines behind me on the potato patch |
This poem was composed in 2001
© Mike Crowl 2001