Bear by boey kim cheng

My daughter's teddy bear,
smuggled into our bed when she stole
into our sleep in the hour
when she is all on her own
fending off the wild things.
What a snug fit, the two between
my wife and me. How a child's sleeping face
marries all in its peace.

I remember my childhood bear;
it was a coarser fur, browner, but like hers
and most other bears, China-made.
My father won it shooting bottles
at a booth in Great or Happy World,
those fairs of dizzy rides and shows
that lasted the whole of your childhood
and have exited into the country's past.
I sat it, walked it, bedded and hugged
it like a raft in the stormy winds
of my parent's quarrels. When
my father left, Bear held faint promise
that he would come back,
and be sensible like Bear.

Year by year, Bear and I waited; the stitches
came undone, the fur shedding
to reveal fibre padding, Bear rubbed
bare to its bones, the limbs that wound
round and round dislocated. Soon
the brown glass eyes were hanging
by a tenuous thread, then gone.
Still I kept him by my side
hoping that things would be
once again whole.

My mother threw him out
in one of those removals,
lost with my father in
the endless migrations of childhood.
It waits now in a heaven
of dislocated things
like my father.