Handle for a Han Girl

Don’t ask me her birth-name,
For I never heard it
Till many years later – too late to take root.
No, she was called Clover:
So terribly English,
So strangely old-fashioned, and strangely un-cute.
And pure Anglo-Saxon – her name, but not her –
No, she was as Chinese as any I’ve met,
With excellent English and excellent manners,
Yet bearing the name that was all Somerset.

And as for her birth-name,
I knew that she had one,
But she never told me, and I never asked.
And had I been told it,
I’d only be baffled
By which was her first name, and which was her last.
So she plucked a new one, did Clover, a new name –
I don’t know why this name, but this name is she.
She chose it at high school, I gather – they all did,
Her classmates and Clover, they chose who to be.

She still has her birth-name,
She hasn’t erased it,
She still has her birth-name for using back home –
But here she is Clover
For living in London,
(Though maybe she’s Cleo when living in Rome).
We in the West are too jealous of birth-names,
We get what we get, and we lump what we got,
Then sneer at the actors and writers for daring –
But Clover is Clover because…well, why not ?

Nomen-Couture

There’s something strange about forenames
In the Anglophonic world –
We’re pretty relaxed about the unusual
(Like Sue for a boy and Manson for a girl).
I was saying as much
To Anglophone Sutch.

“Ah well,” he replied, “we’ve always been
So easy going in our names.
Indeed, we’re laissez-faire to a fault,
And sometimes turn our children into games.
But that doesn’t mean that we don’t care –
Why, ask my daughter, Laissez-Faire !”

“Could it be a Protestant thing ?”
I asked him, but he shook his head.
“Denmark, Iceland, Germany,
Are just as strict as Spain” he said.
“But why not ask a registrar ?”
And so I turned to Proddy Parr.

“We’re under orders not to interfere,”
She told me, “more or less –
So just last week, I registered
An ‘Octopus’, a ‘Table’ and a ‘Mess’.
Little Britons set to make their mark,
Like ‘Superman’ and ‘Sharky-Shark’.”

“That said, we do have, on occasion,
Cause to be a prudent voice
To overly-creative parents,
When their child will have to bear their choice.
It only takes a quiet word
To stop a ‘Clitoris’ or ‘Turd’.”

“But by and large, we’re mostly made
Of Johns and Janes, and that’s okay –
We’ve got the choice, though, that’s the point !
It seems to work, so what they hey.”
And that is why, my darling child,
I named you Unverboten Wilde !

Nom de Guerre

Somewhere out there,
I’m not solitaire,
Cos somebody’s sharing my name.
An unaware pair, we are,
Not quite so rare, we are –
Feels so unfair, but there’s on-one to blame.
I must share a claim
To some unwitting fame –
I ought not to care,
But it still seems a shame:
With names going spare,
It is baffling, I swear,
That two of us bear one the same !