Mobile Photography / Art – Saturday Poetry – Ageing- By Ruth Fainlight
I wanted to celebrate my birthday with you this weekend, tomorrow I will be another year older and I am bursting with gratitude to you all. We are fertilised by time thus allowing our individual uniqueness to blossom. Each one of our powerful hearts, illuminate and inspire, enabling us to conjoin and to share. Thank you to each and everyone of you, we are one!
This weeks Saturday Poetry, matched with mobile photography/art is a poem aptly entitled ‘Ageing’ by Ruth Fainlight.“Fainlight provided a role model for women poets at a time when sexism and tokenism were nastily predominant” The Guardian. Born in New York in 1931, Fanlight is a poet, short-story writer and translator. She has lived in England since the age of 15. Her most recent book is Moon Wheels (2006).
Source: PoetryArchive.org
I have matched @moon_swinger‘s image with this poem. You can follow her on Instagram here.
To view the others we have published in this section, go here. To ensure your image receives our attention, please upload it to Instagram with this hashtag – #theappwhisperer
i
Since early middle-age
(say around forty)
I’ve been writing about ageing,
poems in many registers:
fearful, enraged or accepting
as I moved through the decades.
Now that I’m really old
there seems little left to say.
Pointless to bewail
the decline, bodily and mental;
undignified; boring
not to me only but everyone,
and ridiculous to celebrate
the wisdom supposedly gained
simply by staying alive.
– Nevertheless, to have faith
that you’ll be adored as an ancient
might make it all worthwhile.
ii
Ageing means smiling at babies
in their pushchairs and strollers
(wondering if I look as crazy
as Virginia or Algernon –
though I don’t plan to bite!)
Realising I’m smiling at strangers.
It means no more roller-skating.
That used to be my favourite
sport, after school, every day:
to strap on my skates,
spin one full circle in place,
then swoop down the hill and away.
When I saw that young girl on her blades,
wind in her hair, sun on her face,
like a magazine illustration
from childhood days, racing
her boyfriend along the pavement:
– then I understood ageing.
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Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
