! The First Photo That Memory Took Poem by Michael Shepherd

that moment when …
when memory first opened its treasured album
and began to make our picture of ourselves -

it belongs to all of us, to each of us.
it’s where each meets all, and all meets each;
more of ourselves than we have ever stopped to analyze:

that blurred, out-of-focus moment – was it
the pattern on the hood of our pram,
the strap around our kiddicart,
the turn of the stair,
the pattern of the bricks around the fountain in the park,
the memory of our first fall;
the lion’s head fountain on the wall?

was it not a person, of
those who peered into our cot, or lifted us,
simply because
we could already control those beings around us
with a dribbly smile, a vague wave of our hand?

was it the first thing that we remember
because it paid no attention to ourself,
but simply, was… was, outside our favoured world?

whether we ever open the album, or do not,
it sits there, unexplained,
holding some secret of a consciousness
beyond the theories of scientists and philosophers;
inevitably, ours

to be followed – some years after –
and this, we may deny at first –
by that moment of a further consciousness:
when - as equally mysterious, unforgettable,
and often unremembered to this day -
we knew that we knew something
but did not know what it was we knew.