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POETRY
The Photographer’s Daughter
NaPoWriMo 2025
Lessons, lessons, everywhere.
I am the student
and the teacher is also the Dad.
(PS in addition, I often play the role of the subject)
It’s confounding, but, like the black and white he works in,
he is always correct.
The shades of grey fit to just the right zones,
so well ordered and everything well exposed,
sharp as a tack, beautiful, aching perfection.
Yet he, the master, never considered himself such,
having known some in his time
well enough to line his walls with their
intriguing still lives, a print panoply
of peppers, shells, nudes, and landscapes,
the silver shining back its own defiant lining
and mine all the more still since I must roll
with the wisdom and accept the heartbreaking,
life-typical changes that only a daughter can see.
Today’s poem was prompted by NaPoWriMo’s suggestion of a poem called “Living with a Painting”:
