Carole Satyamurti
Carole Satyamurti is a poet and sociologist, who lives and works in London. For many years she taught at the Tavistock Clinic, where her main academic interest was in the relevance of psychoanalytic ideas to an understanding of the stories people tell about themselves, whether in...
War Photographer
The reassurance of the frame is flexible
- you can think that just outside it
people eat, sleep, love normally
while I seek out the tragic, the absurd,
to make a subject.
Or if the picture's such as lifts the heart
the firmness of the edges can convince you
this is how things are
- as when at ascot once
I took a pair of peach, sun-gilded girls
rolling, silk crumpled, on the grass
in champagne giggles
-as last week, when I followed a small girl
staggering down some devastated street,
hip thrust out under a baby's weight.
she saw me seeing her; my finger pressed.
At the corner, the first bomb of the morning
shattered the stones .
Instinct prevailing, she dropped her burden
and, mouth too small for her dark scream,
began to run...
The picture showed the little mother
the almost-smile. Their caption read
'Even in hell the human spirit
triumphs over all.'
But hell' like heaven, is untidy,
its boundaries
arbitrary as a blood stain on a wall.
War Photographer was written by Carole Satyamurti.