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Megan Hall

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WEDDING

WEDDING

WEDDING

1
We tell my dad, we’re getting married.
It’s a strange time, of emotion, and emotion denied.

How do we work it out, this strange new life?
Do what is right for us, find our own way
in the maze of expectations?

We find help from unexpected places.

2
No shade, not even a wisp,
but he raises her, my other parent, his dead wife.

In her empty wedding dress, green sash,
my mother makes her empty presence known,
living in our words, quietly.

For this I’ve waited all my life: those missing, those missed.

© 2007, Megan Hall
From: Fourth Child
Publisher: Modjaji Books, Cape Town

Megan Hall

Megan Hall

(South Africa, 1972)

Megan Hall was born and grew up in Cape Town, and studied English and Latin at the University of Cape Town. Since 1995, she has worked in the publishing industry and is currently the publishing manager for dictionaries and school literature in English at Oxford University Press, Southern Africa. She has edited poetry and short stories for New Contrast, a South African literary journal. Her firs...

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Fourth Child

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WEDDING

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WEDDING

1
We tell my dad, we’re getting married.
It’s a strange time, of emotion, and emotion denied.

How do we work it out, this strange new life?
Do what is right for us, find our own way
in the maze of expectations?

We find help from unexpected places.

2
No shade, not even a wisp,
but he raises her, my other parent, his dead wife.

In her empty wedding dress, green sash,
my mother makes her empty presence known,
living in our words, quietly.

For this I’ve waited all my life: those missing, those missed.

From: Fourth Child

WEDDING

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