Dazzling

Young Men, Tennis Ladies

The young men at the tennis court
pose and smoke in baggy frocks.
They wear blazers, brimmed hats,
Mary-Janes, almost a uniform.
The hats and the blazers
vary in tone and shape
as if borrowed or stolen
from sisters, and sisters of friends.

The young men smoke with cheek,
much grinning and self-possession,
one cigarette suggesting the finger
at the camera, at the local tennis court.

They are young men without names,
these Michaels, Patricks and Keiths;
no narrative remembered
of their Marys, Patricias, Kathleens.
They ham it up for the camera,
staring it down, grinning,
posing and smoking.
Some of those young men
pass for plain girls, at a glance,
due to posture, and pose;
to distance, the capacity
of a hat to be concealing,
and to the weight and limitations
of eight decades.

It reminds me, said my daughter,
that our ancestors had real lives,
not black and white, formal and virtuous,
with every man a soldier or a priest;
they had real lives of full colour,
where young men posed for photos
laughing, leaning on each other, wearing dresses.