Four poems bringing my Mexican family across the Atlantic Ocean to Scotland

by Matthew del Valle

I. Daughter

I tell my daughter that she will be coming to the land of rainbows.
Why is it full of rainbows, Papá?
Because it often rains here at the same time as the sun shines.
But, Papá, I have so much more sun over here,
and such heavy rain
that it bounces
back up in the air
to come down twice.
So, why are there no rainbows where I am, Papá?
Refraction has no traction
in a child so young,
so I seek an alternative fact.
Y'know about the leprechauns and where they hide their gold, right?
Yes, Papá, in rainbows.
Well, the Aztecs hid their gold,
very carefully,
somewhere else.

II. Going to school

I have to pass a multiple choice test
on registering my children at their new Scottish school.
One of the questions is
Ethnic Origin.
A short question
that sends me on a long clamber
up family trees
to try to understand
who my kids really are.
They are not
White - British
because that's me, not them
and, even then, it´s not quite me either.
They could be
Asian - Other
but that would have been over 14,000 years ago
when the Asian - Others crossed the Bering Strait
and got copulating and populating the Americas.
Unfortunately, there is not an option for a
Conquered Aztec - Other,
whose Hispanic Mother
took a White - British Lover.
So, seeing
 as I have a feeling
that crossing the choice
Other - Other
would suggest that my children are
not from this world,
or that
Not Known
would suggest my
care-less-ness,
I opt finally for
Mixed or Multiple Ethnic Groups
in the hope that my kids
- who sometimes
can be as peely wallie
as the best of them -
will have room in them
for a bit of White - Scottish too.

III. Swapsies

We will swap the land of sun and fire
for the land of rain and ice, and
angry earthquakes and spitting volcanoes
for dormant rocks of royal miles.

We'll swap
cihtli for the celtic rellies,
danzón for a ceilidh,
Los Pumas for The Dons,
Chivas for roast lamb.
We'll swap
malinchismo for better together.

We'll swap
speed limits enforced by
surprising, shattering, sleeping policemen
for those enforced by insomniac cameras.
We´ll swap socially learned laws enforced by physics
for signs, signs, more signs, police warnings and fines.

We'll even swap
seeing dogs kept on roofs or in a designer pram,
for the middle ground of keeping them on terra firma,
whilst valeting their number twos during our walks together.

As a means of deciding where to go,
we used to write a ledger of pros and cons
comparing the two countries.
It is banal, but no less true:
that there's no swapping good for bad,
just two incomparables, two unweighables.

How can you compare
finding a half-hidden pyramid,
in a rainforest full of xocolatl
and howler monkeys roaring Jurassic,
with
clear blue skies
over a white blanket of fresh snow
and
the surge in your heart
as the first daffs bring back the warmth of the sun?

And so we'll just go ahead and swap
so many things, including this:
the feeling that anything can happen
for  the comfort of knowing
that it likely
shall
not.

IV. Son

My young'un likes running as fast as he can
into the walls of our sub-tropical flat.
Then smack on his back
he falls with panache
on the hard, cold Mexican tiling.

Say not a word, about the deep pile, to Mum
found in our new Brittanic bathroom.
But son, you'll love it,
to fall back hard
on a soft, snug Scottish carpet.