I don’t know why I did not stay
with him in Lourmarin
where he introduced me to his neighbor,
the widow of Albert Camus.
He showed me the room
where her late husband wrote—
the masculine desk, granite balcony
overlooking a garden. In the photograph
I lean on the balustrade gazing down
at the camera he trains on my face.
It was May. I remember the red tulips
in bloom. I study the girl who would
soon leave him, her heart swollen
with silence. She looks at him
as he focuses the lens, her eyes holding
the light that filled the bowls
of those flowers.
Whose Eyes Hold The Light by Laura Ann Reed | Lavender Poetry Reed Diffuser
Laura Ann Reed was born in Berkeley, California, earned her B.A. from The University of California, Berkeley which included a year at l’Université Aix-Marseille in France, and lived most of her life in the San Francisco Bay Area before relocating to the Pacific Northwest with her husband, Grant Reed, in 2004. She earned a master’s degree in the performing arts and taught ballet and modern dance at the University of California before earning a master’s degree in clinical psychology. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in eight anthologies, including Poetry of Presence Volume II , and has appeared in numerous journals in the United States, Great Britain and Ireland. She is a contributing editor with the Montréal Review. Her chapbook, Homage to Kafka, was published in July 2025. https://lauraannreed.net/
