Chameleon The Great Poem by Tony Jolley

Saw my eldest daughter yesterday
For only the second time in seven months.

The first I nearly didn’t recognise
Her high-heeled, turquoise, spectator-out-of-water,
As the Blood Red Sea parted and drained down
Upon the floor of the marriage morgue
To leave her all the higher yet none the drier-eyed
Between a father’s rock and a mother’s hard place.

The second, she didn’t deign to register me
Upon her Richter Scale of Consciousness:
Absorbed, as she was, in plaintive prayer
To Chameleon, that Great god of Camouflage,
Bidding him blend her blondness
Into the bus queue blandness
And cloak her with invisibility against only me.

The look didn’t quite kill
But her words mugged me
Of my wallet of hope
Of any real reconciliation
This side of the summer and
This side of the sea.