 when making love to a woman: ‘Will you take it to your lips/ Like the body of a woman,  we all know is just a hollow box, mechanized to obey?’ The comparison of the camera to a hollow box is somewhat dismissive, until you consider that most modern cameras are not hollow boxes; rather, they are full of complex electronics. Thus, the speaker is really saying is that it is the photojournalist who decides the image; it is the photojournalist who risks their life to capture what they ultimately want to capture.


The speaker claims to want a heart like the photojournalist – to want to care more about the exterior life than the inner life. Perhaps the photojournalist does care more about strangers than personal relationships, and who would know this better than their lover? ‘Sometimes I want my heart to beat like yours: from the outside in,/ A locket stuffed with faces that refuse to be named.’ Normally, a locket carries an image of someone beloved. But the locket that the photojournalist carries contains not just – or maybe not even – the face of their lover, but all of the faces that they have recorded. These are faces that, on some occasions, must only have been encountered for mere seconds – the faces of people who will remain nameless.


 ‘For time// To land at my feet like a grenade.’ What could be more dangerous than a volatile, explosive grenade? Perhaps the speaker is ending the ‘letter’ by suggesting that the photojournalist is not just doing this job for altruistic reasons – to make the world a better, fairer place – but perhaps they are also doing the job for the thrill of it, because they are an adrenaline junkie who is addicted to danger. There are no easy answers to this complex relationship, this complex profession, or indeed, this complex poem.


454 VERSE 2025


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