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Siblings and Fascinator
The red & white bi-colour bloom echoes their duality
The yin/yang within each child and the XX/XY
of spliced siblings| If I place my hand over the half-face
of one I instantly see the whole face of the other
They fit perfectly| chin curving to chin| crown arcing
to crown| Even their lips smile evenly as the gaze
of their eyes is held on the level| Would a stranger
perceive the discrepancy| his nine years to her twelve?
Only the frayed hem of their fringes suggests a split
but to those in the know the rift conceals stitched name tags
inside their collars| His signifies a boarder’s voiceless hurt
hers the tongue-tied day girl parted from her brother
And as if to endorse this thought| three tiny red petals
from the garden cutting of Salvia microphylla in her hair
have detached and| akin to Hans Arp’s chance fragments
dare rising like blown speech bubbles over their head
MASHUP | MONTAGE
I
I didn’t know my mother here in 1936 in her wedding dress
lace veil trailing steps in the photo at Tendes cemetery in 1998
because she wasn’t there under the lichen-blotched medieval arch
and she didn’t know me when she was here on the cutout map
the St Lawrence a paler arctic blue than the wide Québec sky
bouquet brushing the Betula papyrifera| because I wasn’t either
II
when she was a kid her father pioneered mineral & analytical
chemistry and she was given Maria Chapdelaine on her birthday
Maria lost her husband-to-be in the perilous mountains not
trapping bears but battling blizzards & crevasses to propose to her
and so she chose the frontier life of sacrifice & toil & prayer
resigned like her mother to a man who loved but wasn’t her beloved
III
and my mother can’t see my homage pastiche of herself/arch/map
she doesn’t know me at the Gallery of Modern Art Vancouver 2016
exploring the MASHUPexhibition| but she knew Picasso &
Braque in her native Paris and then in Toulouse where she married
my sceptical Scouse father amidst her Catholic & Jewish cousins
and must have come across Hannah Höch in war-torn Europe
Meeting with the Elders
After Aw Tee Hong’s sculpture: The River Merchants
Singapore & Borneo are steeped in childhood mystery
the myth of my mother & the bishop we called Father
his stories of canoes & longhouses| tales of voodoo
and the pulsing beauty of rainforest| river & delta
I sensed my father’s resentment| his fear I’d be bewitched
and work for the bishop entranced by fables & magic
But other schools drew me to the music of the East End
& Brixton with the beat & rhythm of languages
& patois| dialects & slang| Today printing photographs
I took last May of Singapore street art & sculpture
as J explored his old work haunts & office buildings
now dwarfed by skyscrapers| I place the pavement art
of multinational faces as a backdrop for the bronze
Scottish merchant| Chinese trader| Malay chief
who could be a group of scholars or philosophers
exchanging myths with the Indian & Chinese migrants
loading goods into a bullock cart| and import an early
work photo of J to this meeting with the Elders
Lucy Hamilton Poetry 