Camera

 Will pictures bring it sooner the birdsong

Was not for him a question heard or unheard:

Best equipment got the moment referred.

The twentieth century went so long,

He had all morning to get the light

Glassy cliffs, frond angle, stream trick, side glows.

Sounds scintillate, but his frame was composed

To relive stories in the dark room’s night.

We peer childlike into gumleaf-brown lens

Upsidedown cascades of patterned still-life

Where there are no questions of right or wrong.

We hear what we wish to hear of birdsong

And faintly sense his calm, how his eye on life

Seizes the day that buried so many whens.

This week I have revisited photographs of my great uncle John Henry Harvey (1855-1938) held in the State Library, for posting on Lost Melbourne. Here is an undated photograph of forest at Eltham, with a Heysen feel to it. Also a sonnet about someone who would cart great cameras around the place in order to take a lasting image.