Big Tent Prompt

This week in response to the prompt at Big Tent Poetry, I wrote a poem based a photograph (in this case my father’s maternal grandparents) as if from the point of view of a traveling photographer:

The Pursers Sit for a Photograph

While my city subjects preferred posing
in parlors, familiar furnishings, oak mantles,
doorways framing the family group,
the rural photographs I captured
never failed to take me by surprise.

Always out of doors, they chose backdrops
of mailboxes, ancient oak  trees, wishing wells.
They carried shotguns, whistled for bird dogs.
Sometimes they lugged the dining chairs
into the yard, seating mother and father, sober
and unsmiling, while the children, so many
sometimes, some not much younger
than the current Mrs., evidence of ravages
of toil and childbearing with little time
to regain strength.  These two, though,
proud of their automobile, no mule
required, chose to perch in its foreground,
its headlights like bug eyes, as they look
right at me, squinting into the sun,
him silent just long enough for flash,
then resuming his  tale,  sipping his RC Cola ,
daring to look me right in the eye, to call me Son.

And when she smoothed her skirts, retrieving
the apron she had laid across the mailbox,
just out of the camera’s view, ready to head
back inside where chores awaited, he reached
his giant hand, putting it on her shoulder,
as if to tell her Tarry awhile, little lady.
We’ve got company. Work will wait.