Tag Archives

Kodak Brownie

POETRY

THE BOX BROWNIE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read1.8K views

The photo of Stephen Baum and me aged 4

falls out of the back of a book. Each of us

is holding a part of a redundant

Kodak Brownie and laughing in ecstasy.

The battered camera is Stephen’s.

The sun is shining, and we are on the lawn

in front of the flats where we lived. It was spring

or summer ’47. Our mothers

would take us to the entrance of the yard

of the dairy on Child’s Hill so we could watch

the horses and hear the waters rushing

through wooden slats, washing the bottles,

and Golders Hill Park where the sticklebacks were,

and the Heath with its ack-ack emplacements.

The snap would have been taken by my mother

or his. The Baums moved to a semi

in Temple Fortune. My mother and me

moved north. I bought the book much later:

a second hand edition of Arthur Mee’s

‘London – Heart of the Empire and Wonder

of the World’, thickened with age and damp,

in which a child had written in pencil,

on the last page, ‘THE END’.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
1 Comment
POETRY

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read2.1K views

Snapped black and white in Kodak Verichrome,

more than seventy years ago, by an aunt

with a Kodak Brownie, I am supine

in a small pram. The park’s avenue

of lime trees in leaf suggests May

and therefore me, coverless, five months.

My fingers are clasped and bare feet are crossed,

like an effigy’s or a lounge lizard’s.

I am awake and eyeing the camera,

through half-shut lids, like an insulted

potentate – or an about-to-be-mardy

baby.  Behind me, in the distance,

is the spire of the Victorian

sandstone parish church, in the middle ground

tennis courts and someone serving.

 

Beside me, in sharp focus (on a bench

with concrete ends and wooden slats, ‘There’s-

a-war-on-you-know’ weeds burgeoning

beneath it) my mother, a handsome woman

with rich, auburn hair, a war widow since March –

her ancestors Welsh seafarers, some drowned,

some landlocked.  She is almost smiling.

 

Most days, in all seasons, we walk the park,

an Edwardian legacy, named

for Queen Alexandra, a fashionista

mother of six, a loather of Prussians –

being a daughter of a Danish king –

and disabled over time by her deafness,

then slowly losing speech and memory.

We talk of the present – how our daughter laughed

on the swings and now her daughter does.

 

 

 

Pages:

Share

David Selzer By David Selzer
2 Comments