The Journal Wk. 24
The Mirror and the Light: The Five Wounds
‘He understood everything,’ she says. ‘He understood you betrayed him.’
…
Don’t speak to me of innocence, he thinks. I pulled down certain men who insulted your father as an example to others — call them innocent, if your definition stretches. I ripped them from their gambling and dancing and tennis play. I made each one a bridegroom: I married them to crimes they had barely imagined, and walked them to their wedding breakfast with the headsman. I heard young Weston beg for his life. I held George Boleyn as he wept and called on Jesus. I heard Mark whimper behind a locked door; I though, Mark is a feeble child, I will go down and free him, but then I thought, no, it is his turn to suffer….
… You can persuade the quick to think again, but you cannot remake your reputation with the dead.
The Mirror and the Light, 286, 287, 291
The world falls
From under you
And all your sins are vain
And all your ghosts accuse you,
Saying thus: we wept
As you turned yourself to stone,
You would not hear
And those you love would never fault you;
We are nothing
Only memory
But when we prick you
You shall bleed.
The dead are farthest from you now;
You pace
The narrow garden of your mind
And do not know yourself
And cry, alas, a stranger
Without his ghosts, a naked man –
Alas, who will advise me when my ghosts are gone?
For time rolls in around you
And sows the seeds of your unmaking.
In the mirror of your days
Lie all the things you might have done;
Each room contains a different man
Looking, troubled, in a different mirror.
How, then, lost in all the times that are and never were
Will you see the final wound?
How will you choose
To haunt the living?
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
Gorgeous!