Photographic Evidence of a Different Life. A poem by Rachael Hegarty

It seemed a good idea at the time.
How to spend a rainy pandemic day?
Get the kids to sort all the old photos
and peel them off their teenage devices.
Bags of family prints and holiday snaps,
our past captured in 6 by 4 pictures
scattered all over the kitchen table.
We gazed, laughed and sorted into albums.
They found the shots of our lives before them.
Our sons’ eyes lit up at the evidence
of their folks juggling fire on a beach
in Jamaica and playing drinking games
with Russian sailors and Korean fishermen
on a Japanese island called Hokkaido.

……………

Rachael Hegarty’s debut, Flight Paths Over Finglas(Salmon 2017) won the Shine Strong Award. May Day 1974( Salmon 2019), has received national and international acclaim for its call for justice for the forgotten victims of the Troubles. Rachael’s third collection, Dancing with Memory(Salmon) will be launched in 2021. Her kids say she uses the 3 F-words too much: Finglas, feminism and feckin’ poetry. http://www.salmonpoetry.com