When we travel I bring back a suitcase full of memories and a camera full of colour. I get glimpses of another culture, another way of doing life, of being, and that is all good …
meat, oiled by sunlight
haggled by women
men staple leather
while gutted fish offend tourists
bark carved into castles
beside hand-picked spices
hats racked for workers
rejected by visitors as not exotic
I barter for four sunlit shirts
one is white with startled yellow birds
flying from its shoulders
into the blue Mexican sky
held by my camera
in a forever of coloured squares
first published in Quills
A Summer Father … terse, imagistic lines; … It’s not nostalgia that we experience but quiet, poignant grief. Richard Stevenson