Reflection on a Portrait by Lee Nash

Portrait of Space, by Lee Miller, 1937.

Reflection on a Portrait

It’s been a decade since
I photographed a different sky.
I picture the hand-held Rolleiflex
next to her stomach; their candid
progeny of war. The obscenity,
a pyrrhic victory developing
inside her own darkening room.

Light that by keen error
revealed a negative gloom,
showed black a blinding flash –
anecdote, curious heritage –
now curls about me, a question
on its lips. A view offers me entrance,
yet warns me. Hunter, what will
you find out there? What do you
want to capture? I have no answer,
on the right side of the frame;
feelings shuttered, hidden.

Yet I know that something open
begs us to go through, though its
limits also beg to be mended
and cannot, no more than
a dune can be rebuilt from sand
the wind has taken. No more than
ashes scattered in a herb garden
can be found again. I remember
shots, speed, still confusion,
rounds, clicks in the crowded town,
blank faces and shamed-faced beauty,
fading rooms of glory. Heinous
conditions; hell’s dramatic shadow.
The times when I wound on, quickly.

Lee Nash

Lee Nash lives in France and freelances as an editorial designer for a UK publisher. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in the UK, the US and France including The French Literary Review, The Dawntreader, The Lake, Inksweatandtears, Orbis, Sentinel Literary Quarterly, The Interpreter's House, The World Haiku Review, Black Poppy Review and Silver Birch Press. You can find a selection of Lee’s poems at leenashpoetry.com.