Tender, a word I’d forgotten to use, paints a picture of today that might be found in photographs on my mantelpiece already there and yet also to be, in the latest later.
Today’s rush to say ‘look at us – it’s for your auntie, miles and miles away – the camera wants to capture you today’ contains the loss I find in the albums my grandparents bound, in acid-free tissue and left to be found in camphor-wood trunks, that move and touch a part of life shared, as I today am passed a child, whose cares are mine as mine were theirs before the birth of memory of the tragedies we share – now in eulogy.
Tender tender tenderly.
Cherry Coombe 