Photos from my father

From the unexpected envelope

slip 7x5s and 8x10s –

people, places, not seen since boyhood.

A Post-it attached reads: ‘Just keep these’.

Most of the images are landscape:

sunlight, splayed by oaks; autumn midges

shot at dawn (‘Exmoor ’76’);

Crosby, Stills and Nash live in concert;

a forest of ponies, yellow-brown

like a still from The High Chaparral;

something captured at night, only not;

a close-up of what might be duckweed.

The last is a portrait of a young

Chinese boy, smiling over his lunch.

On the back, a hurried: ‘I love you’.

It all arrives three decades too late.

In early childhood, the poet was often

(incorrectly) assumed to be Chinese.