Mark Roberts #1 Slides - Prelude

February Poems - Notes

During February I will posting a draft poem each day. The poems will be based, in the main, on old family slides - images from my childhood captured on a lost technology, difficult to view now. Some of these poems will form part of a larger work I am working on called LACUNA others may be put back in the slide box to eventually gather mould in the dark recesses of this project over the coming years.......

Slides - Prelude

The boxes had sat under the house since the last move. Before that they sat in the garage of the last house. Pieces of my parents life, packed up when we emptied their house after my father's death. One box is full of slides, old technology that I don't even have a way of viewing properly now. They are still packed in plastic trays that you place in the slide machine. There was a lever on the side that pushed the slide into front of the bulb when you pulled it down and pushed it back when you pulled it up.

I pick a slide out of the box and hold it up to the light. The colours, once intense kodachrome, have now faded to bright pastels. The image is at first hard to see, I have to make sure the light is directly behind the slide, even then I have to relearn how to read the slide – once I could hold a slide up to the light, determine up from down, left to right, front to back, and load it back in its tray so it displayed the right way. Now I have to squint to make the image out, turning the slide over and over.