My antique camera, Anne Frank and Reverend King
What has developed since then?
What has survived of that time?
Anne Frank ran out of time and never fully developed
her black and white photos never became 60’s Polaroids or Instagram selfies.
Anne Frank, Jacky O and Martin Luther King,
born in 1929, a head of their time, in writing, style and thinking.
Criticised, attacked, shot at, murdered but remembered for all time.
All gone now but my camera survives,
built in Berlin in 1929 when Europe lost its mind
The Olympic Games televised
Jesse Owens and the Race of his life
Trials and rallies in Nuremberg
Before the collapse of Communism and fall of the Berlin Wall,
which was not even built in 1929,
Checkpoint Charlie and the Cold War
The Berlin Airlift and bankers committing suicide on Wall Street.
Dressed in Channel pink and shot at from an open window,
how many history books has that book depository seen?
As the shocking events of that day in Dallas echoed in history.
Martin Luther marched forward and was one in a million,
Anne Frank unbelievably was one in six million.
Her diary notes, pages that make us choke.
What has developed in print and film?
Audrey Hepburn had breakfast at Tiffanys
and Grace Kelly became a princess
what stories and history has developed
since my camera’s development in 1929’s Berlin?
The stock market crashed
Black and White clashed
Death and destruction
Code breaking computers
Holocaust and Civil Rights
and Rockets to the moon
Dear diary, “I had a dream”
where everyone asks,
“not what the country can do for” them
but takes “one small step for mankind”
Four score and ten, my camera has seen it all
90 years of recorded black and white history.
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