The Little Photographer Poem by Gordon R Menzies

Wise beyond your ten little years
a frail and forgotten waif
with a black and white camera
tartan trousers and horn-rimmed glasses
saving our innocence in
four by six misty windows
you could almost reach through
plucked from the air like wildflowers
from a disappearing meadow
you knew would seed no more

Somehow they survived the years
faded grey snapshots of a lost world
blurred both in fact and in memory
Did you know you were saving
the very best part of us?
Let me reach through the white frame
and touch your tiny hand
to let you know that
forty years down the road
I will be there to thank you

At the end of it all, Little Photographer
lay me down grey and faded
like these treasures of yours
a pressed flower squeezed free
of the taint of the years between
drained of depth and colouring
Let me feel one last time
that first breath of arrival
draw it deep and sweet, and
let it be my very last