Sister in a Box (New Poem)

Stood there on the left outside the kitchen
Crying out my eyes
While you were sat in a box
Our emotions carry across camera shots
From another lifetime ago.

Now we are both deep into our 40s
I am still stood there even now in amazement
Every-time I pass our first house
Remembering our mother
With that battered old camera

Swiping at the leaves on the footpath
In her broken slippers
Directing the four of us
Like a flag to a pole
For that one shot

Fusing emotions into moments
When I wouldn’t stop crying
After she directed you and Maria
Into two battered old cardboard boxes
Leaving me and Stuart on the verges

Facilitating that picture like a film director
Into a improvised melodrama realising after
Once we had completed your art statement
I had been crying my eyes out
Wanting to be in one of those boxes.

Almost 40 years later
I am still startled with wet eyes
With your words reaching out
Like hands to comfort you
Scaling those memories again.

Each tear imprinting itself
In the shadows of the alleyway
At the back of where we once lived
Brimming with our childhoods even now
Reprinting pictures in my memories.

(NB. Picture is from 1976 with me, my sister and two cousins)