Photographs

Richard II watches Wat Tyler's death and
addresses the peasants in the background:
taken from the Gruuthuse manuscript
of Froissart's Chroniques (c. 1475).
Wat Tyler was the leader of
the English Peasants revolt, 1381.
http://www.brh.org.uk/heads2008/rad_his.htm

A surprise ending is today's prompt from the Poetry School. This doesn't really conform to a surprise, more that it draws up the threads of what has gone before, on the last line.

I suppose it might be called a sonnet as it has 14 lines.  The first five are shown below.

Photographs

Then we learnt about processing photos, and

leaving fear behind, from the women at Grunwick.

How our bodies were not our own

before the 1967 Act. What was black

and white from twenty-seven years ...