Sestina for Dispossessed Children

Every weekend I go to Chicago with my father,

who whisks me off to the natural history museum

where I drag him through exhibitions with silly names

like ‘Inside Ancient Egypt’, a massive reconstruction of a tomb.

Engraved on sandstone, marble, and jewels are hieroglyphs,

which capture my eyes.

The ancient Egyptians inscribed all-seeing eyes

everywhere. ‘Actually, this is the Eye of Horus,” says my father,

when someone says it’s on the back of the dollar bill. ‘That’s not a hieroglyph.’

I’m glad he took me to the Chicago museum

even if he was always anxious. As if he would wind up in a tomb

specifically designed by my mother, bearing his name.

During one visit I rush through and try to read all the names,

sodalite scarabs and sarcophagi replete with eerie eyes,

festooned like ribbons strewn across this reconstructed tomb.

It is dark, haunted by mummies held up by wire, and my father

seems afraid of the dark. Or the bodies. Or maybe the museum.

He hardly speaks to me in this memory, a human hieroglyph.

On another visit a curator teaches me to read hieroglyphs,

explaining how they are pictures representing ideas, sounds and names.

Names contain spiritual power, harbouring magic. The museum

is a space of magic in a child’s eyes.

Entranced by owls, sun discs, and zig-zags, the curator advises my father

to buy me a book on hieroglyphs so we can leave the tomb.

Over time I realise that my parents’ divorce was a tomb

built for their own demise, painted with hieroglyphs,

symbols, gestures, and texts that my father

could only understand because he’s a lawyer, and the names

spelled out could never do wrong in his eyes. 

The court becomes a museum.

I want to spend every day, hour, and minute in the Chicago museum

but I am forced to dwell in my parents’ tomb.

I can only see outside because I have painted on my limbs Horus’s eyes,

coated myself in what I understand. Egyptian hieroglyphs

and translations of my first and last name

the latter which will be taken away when my mother wins custody from my father.

I become an incomprehensible hieroglyph.

Knowing the power of what’s in a name,

my mother severs the link between child and father.