Poems, Photos and Photomontages
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The Bust [II]
As she cuts out her 'selfie' taken twenty years before 'selfie'
was invented| she is also twenty years on from that impulse
to picture herself naked with a pot-plant on her head
Memory recalls an empty-gesture feeling| some fleeting
madness| the glass of wine in her hand not symbol but fact
Now the Bust materialises like an act of recognition
a statement of connection across history| woman to woman
or the Sufi poet sculpting a secret woman in his words
The pot of cyclamen stands proud on the selfie's head as she
tints the petals and fixes her seamlessly to the Bust's stiff dress
Selfie stares at the viewer| two fingers clasping the wine glass
while the pot gazes nonchalantly out of the window
She does not know how deeply she knows her| She is the woman
who reaches through space & time and appears unbidden
Note: Line 8 is quoted from the Iraqi poet Salah Niazi’s poem ‘Le Sufi Sculpt Une Femme’, Choix de Poèmes (Éditions Aden, 2015)
A Serious Girl
In spite of all appearances to the contrary she was not
actually here in the cemetery leaning against a medieval
lichen-covered arch in France at the age of twenty-two
In spite of all appearances to the contrary she was there
concretely standing on steps in front of the Hayward Gallery
a few paces from the Ministry of Agriculture Fish & Food
In spite of appearances the man at the Ministry was not
the one she wanted to film her regardless of pinewood scents
since he said she was a studious girl and laughed ‘too serious’
for a girl of her age while taking the photos to prove it
In spite of his appearance of being a nice man she did not
want to meet in the pine woods notwithstanding her sense
of the natural world and that there was something deeper
for she was too serious for a girl of her age so she agreed
because it was agreeable because G&T agreed with her
she agreed to the photos and he agreed she was too serious
when all the while she was dreaming of possible new vistas
all the time biding until a deer until a deer leapt into view
Feeding the Fish at Ni Yan Tai Park, Jiangxi Province
Young Women by Water Lily Lake, Jiangxi Province
Lucy Hamilton co-edited Long Poem Magazine from 2008 to 2018. She works freelance for Cam Rivers Publishing (a partnership between the UK and China based at King’s College, Cambridge), and has made several trips to China. Her two collections of prose poems are Stalker (Shearsman, 2012), shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Of Heads & Hearts (Shearsman, 2018). She is currently working on commissioned travel essays, and poetry which draws on the I Ching. She is an editor, poetry tutor and mentor.
