Len Webster's 'The Photograph' Poem by Len Webster

I stare at the picture:
my father at thirteen.
The boy who saved the day,
keeping goal for the school team.
No-one survives. None of the team
nor the two proud teachers
standing stiffly behind
in collar and tie.

The school building exists here, on paper
and in my fading memory,
my father's half-smiling, adolescent face
proud, too,
unaware that I would arrive
twenty-one years later,
unaware that a girl not yet seven years old
would be his wife,
both unaware that I would be here now,
eighty-three years on,
scratching my memory
in the vain hope of unravelling
the most slender threads
of the life before my own.