Poem: 'Exhibition'

by Dawn Sands

(image by Andrea Piacquadio)

The child’s skeleton is pinned against the wall.

Eternally upright, fixed into position

by the perspex case that imprisons her,

By the crude, rusted nails which bind her

ever to this perspective.

A small plaque on the wall brands her Unidentified Girl,

her life

and its peaks and troughs;

The innermost secrets of the place beyond her soul

and the song she yearned to declare to the world

reduced to these two words, Unidentified Girl;

Her final and most notable epithet.

This is the face of history.

Her death was a silent cataclysm.

My eyes trace the outline of her fingers,

Those slender, fragile fingers, which once

were caked in mud as she shrank back from her mother’s scolding words;

which once

clutched the bones of another, much the same;

another Unidentified Girl

as they whirled each other round and round and round

And vowed to remember this moment

for all eternity.

Did she know she was going to die?

Did she know, as she laid her fragile skull on her pillow 

(whose cloth, too, is now eroded by time)

That one glorious new dawn would be her last?

And can she see you now,

Peering through the perspex,

Leaving greasy fingerprints on the cage which holds her life,

And scanning over the final remnants of her identity一

Unidentified Girl一

Before hurrying to the next exhibition

and leaving nothing but the mud from your boots

at the foot of her life?