Lucy Hamilton
from REASSEMBLAGE
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 mossy French 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
II
when she was a kid and her father pioneered mineral & analytical
chemistry and she was given Maria Chapdelaine on her birthday
when Maria lost her husband-to-be in the perilous mountains
not trapping bears but battling blizzards & crevasses to propose
when Maria chose the lonely 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 pastiche-medley of herself/arch/map
doesn’t know me at the Gallery of Modern Art Vancouver 2016
exploring the MASHUP exhibition|but she knew Picasso &
Braque in her native Paris and in Toulouse where she married
my Scouse atheist father amidst her Catholic / Jewish cousins
and must have come across Hannah Höch in war-torn Europe
FARM BOY ON THE WIRRAL
I
Searching for a photo of my dad with the old Shire horse
its breath & steaming flanks|love-nuzzles & dung
I stumble instead upon the girl riding bare-back
he cut out of the Liverpool Post and kept for sixty-plus years
When I find him he’s with a cow|its distinctive patterns
of the Friesian stock originating from ancient Frisia
Preferring pastoral pursuits to Roman warfare
the Frisii|known for their care and breeding of cattle
chose ox hides & horns as payment for government tax
rather than furnish the army with officers & soldiers
I slice round the heiffer’s outline struck by how it turns
its head & horns towards the fourteen year-old boy
Echoes of Van Gogh’s donkey|as if trustful of this lad
wearing the farm-muck jacket he once wore for school
II
I cut out the boy holding the cow by a staff attached
to its nose-ring|a practice over 4000 years old and visible
on horses on the Standard of Ur|The following year
affronted at being a ‘child’ and longing to prove his mettle
he’d claim to be eighteen in a failed attempt to enlist
Now highlighting script in his last ever letter to me
Still reading ASK THE FELLOWS WHO CUT THE HAY
by George Ewart Evans| farms were like that when I was
a farmer’s boy 60 odd years ago| I recall his passion for animals
How he never used spiked rings on his own sow’s teats
so she’d force her piglets to wean|I detach the collie
true focus of the cow’s attention|and snip out his slanting
longhand with serrated sewing-scissors|How glad I am
for these memories he says|Then glue the text so it rests
like an epigraph or testament along the heiffer’s back
Farms these days can have nothing of that old romance & magic
Copyright © Lucy Hamilton 2018
Lucy Hamilton has co-edited Long Poem Magazine since its inception in 2008. Issue 19 (May 2018) will be her last. She now works as an editor for the Cambridge Rivers Project, King's College, Cambridge. Her recent collections are Stalker (Shearsman, 2012), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Of Heads & Hearts (Shearsman, 2018). Recent poetry and artwork have appeared in Long Exposure, Ink, Sweat & Tears and The Wolf. Her work appeared previously in Molly Bloom 7.