after Simon Wu’s picture of three flamingos in flight
.
I’d read about the punctum
in an article on photography –
the intentional shot taken
and finding what makes it memorable
is capturing something unintended.

An example it gave of a punctum
was a picture of protestors,
all looking angry, except one woman
smiling serenely,
while holding her banner.

I guess the interest is in the contrast.
If all the protesters were smiling serenely,
would a scowling woman become
the punctum? Or is a scowling woman
too much of a cliché to be a punctum?

I took a picture of three flamingos in flight
over a lake on the island of Agistri,
but my legacy phone, with its basic camera,
revealed a shot of grey sky with no flamingos –
not even three specks.

Of the ten flamingos on the lake,
only one was pink, the rest were white.
Was the pink flamingo the punctum,
or is a pink flamingo, like a scowling woman,
too unoriginal to be a punctum?

I asked Simon to send me his picture
of three flamingos in flight
because he has the latest smartphone
and its camera is powerful with high
resolution and megapixels.

He sent it, but my phone battery died,
and I haven’t seen evidence of what I saw –
three flamingos in flight, two white,
one pink, and a punctum
as undeveloped an idea as a white flamingo.
.
.
.
Lisa Kelly‘s second collection, The House of the Interpreter (Carcanet), is a PBS Summer 2023 Recommendation. Her debut, A Map Towards Fluency (Carcanet), was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy She is Chair of Magma Poetry and co-editor of the Conversation issue; the Deaf issue; the Solitude issue; and is currently co-editing the Grassroots issue. She is also the co-editor of the anthology, What Meets the Eye?: The Deaf Perspective (Arachne Press).