The Journal Wk. 19
The Mirror and the Light: Salvage II
‘I suppose you can err like other men, and God he knows, you may be heading for disaster. But for me all roads lead there. I reach the crossroads and I throw the dice, and whichever comes up, it is the same – it is the swamp, or the abyss, or the ice….’
The Mirror and the Light, 81
All roads lead where I am going,
To the long-awaited end, or certain disaster:
The way is governed by that holy monster, Chance
Who bears the hands of living women
And eyes that were the dead’s.
What the king dreams I know not
Save that those self-same eyes burn through
His waking soul, and so through mine;
So bound and burned alike we lie.
‘Ah, I see the Treason Act,’ Margaret says gaily. ‘I see its trip-wire. It is a crime to envisage the future. We are trapped in the hour we occupy.’
The Mirror and the Light, 108
In a single hour we stand
Bereft of past and future —
Lawful territory lies in neither,
Only here
Beneath the blinding light
We revolve, and smile, and pass a season
Till its varied memory is turned to treason.
As you love the king
Reflect him, and him alone.
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
