Others

The others drew up in an endless succession:

their unions an Alaskan wilderness;

the hangman’s lines mapped on their faces.

A cavalcade of the silently bereft,

whose unseen losses would be hidden

by the appearance of us.

And we were infant prizes,

given away in a shameless charade

of pass the human parcel.

The layers of our histories were hastily unwrapped;

discarded along with our protestations,

and our mothers’ forbidden anguish.

All safety and security annihilated,

we panicked, horrified at the unspeakable absence

of mother; of self.

We hid inside our dismal shrouds of despair,

our familiars vanished: face, voice, taste, touch, smell;

replaced by unrecognisable otherness.

They squandered our identities,

made us strangers to ourselves,

and pretenders to their inheritance.

This, then, is how we lived our childhoods:

as ghosts, like the dead, shrouded always,

and forever hidden from our mothers.