Day of the Bride

by Joy Kogawa.

The day of the bride dawns
Through layers of white plaster skin
And multi-sashed kimono
Head made huge by lacquered hair-
She is swept ashore in her glass bottle
White and tight as a folded paper message
Eyes hidden in a swirl of green boughs.
She moves like a mannequin
Manoeuvred by centuries of ceremony 9
Under the weight of speech and incantation
A wail of priests and watching families
Beside rows of low tables
With small triangles of paper
Congratulatory slits of squid and curls of seaweed.
Then kneeling at the end of a fresh memory
She is discarded by her heavy day 16
And is plunged into the twentieth century
Tiny apartment daily stream
As a barely visible
Folded paper speck