Swizzle Stick

an old photograph seen in a museum as a child

April 10 — Free day — a topic or focus of your own choosing! (And this might be free verse, too! Or not! Exercise your free will!)

a portrait in my museum of memory,
historical in colour, thin & brittle,
hand-tinted, I was a child
when I saw her portrait,
in the shot she was maybe
at my age of ten, this girl
now dead, staring out at me;
she is still looking out at me
from the sepia long-distance of 1923

her gaze holds, asks me to look
at her thick sandy brows,
blonde tresses like rope,
faded cotton dress painted lemon,
face & limbs fair, & paler than mine

Miss Clara O’Pringle: Albino Native Girl, 1923
engraved upon her portrait's frame
of curling brass, what else I might guess
from her ghostly gaze?
what was her life like,
as a stolen child in service
in her pale white-person dress
in a sepia world where so much was the same?