I am yet to know what it is
that a photograph holds for a boy
who misses his father when the union is over.
Today, in Guinea, New Papua,
a boy posed alone in a picture, waving his hand—
a way to say, I miss him whom I called Father.
This is over eight months of savaged contact,
and the cameraman knew nothing about this.
How in every lens and capturing of this moment,
the boy’s pose speaks volumes
of loneliness and a world without meaning.
Yesterday, this picture was handed over to me.
I stared deep into his heart through his eyes,
to speak of the brokenness behind them—
how he held home and fatherhood
behind unspoken words that the mother
knows not but justifies the savaging
of the bridge more mundane than her son’s
brokenness and aches that he lives with.
But in every pose for a picture, he speaks out:
Here, I am speaking for this emptiness—
this cloudy sky full of rain but unable to rain,
to wash out from my heart this vacuum
created when the parents choose to separate
without any sense of the aftermath for their kids.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by ZOOM academic from Pexels