Hearts in London, 2

Part of the installation of Hearts at Circular Quay in December 2016

Hearts in London continued
Part 1 here.

On the Tube from Arsenal to Elephant
and Castle, a boy frowns over buttons,
dials and switches on a tiny cube. A woman
flashes me a warning smile, ‘He’s my son, and
I see you looking.’ So I ask him what it is. ‘A thing

for people who have restless hands.’
His father adds with what may be
a Dutch accent, ‘It’s called a Fidget Cube.’
We’ve spent the afternoon with Sue and David
wedging clay (like kneading dough, but thumpier)

at Clay Time in N5 where Jawad our host
told migration stories to rival the worst
of Australia’s (well, not quite up
to Manus and Nauru standards, but bad),
and Brexit as a vicious assault on so many.

That’s Thursday. Friday we meet again to shape
clay into hearts – with aorta, vena cava and
sundry pipes – in six easy steps, in a windowless
room in labyrinthine King’s College London:
forty-three hearts in a tray by half past four,

then on to the launch of a new iteration
of Penny’s Connecting Hearts Project
which is, after all, why we’re here.
Nibbles and drinks and meet-and-greet chat
in a room that till 4 had been a student caff,

then Anna Professor and Jim Academic
and Emily from the Museum of Migration
spoke of the project’s UK context, and
conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant
(don’t worry about the Latin, it’s just a little joke):

Penny spoke. Two years ago, as she tells it,
she woke from a dream of a heart being ripped
and stabbed and, not knowing why, she began
to shape in clay what she hoped was a humanish
heart. And the clay gave her hands an idea.

By the end of the year, more than four hundred people
had learned to shape humanish hearts
in clay, and had made one for each person
who’d come to Australia for refuge and been detained
with small hope of release on Manus Island or Nauru.

Among the early heartmakers were Rohingya
women who first drew barbed wire in the clay
and then wrote words: ‘I want my husband
in Manus.’ Long-ago refugees from Croatia
sang old songs and shed big tears.

Immigrants, children of immigrants, refugees,
activists, people of faith, artists,
even ceramicists sat at her tables and sweated
their DNA into the clay as they shaped it,
took up a stylus and made their marks.

Weirdly contorted, like arthritic hands
or slaughtered wild creatures, no two the same,
each one an oddity, they grew to an army
inanimate, cool, waiting for the breath
of life. She filmed them in a field like

casualties of war. She laid them in a circle
wrapped in muslin, and invited people
to unwrap them, to write on the cloth
(‘I’m sorry’ ‘I am ashamed’ ‘I will not
forget that you are there’). In December

a vast spiral (‘So many lives in limbo’)
at Circular Quay: a thousand passersby
entered, walked the meditative shape,
took a moment from the endless noise
and let it sink in (‘So many lives’). A fence

became a fluttering message wall.

(More to come)