The Journal Wk. 29

The Image of the King/Broken on the Body

You have thought too much to speak;

You have spoke too much and let the air

Take on some meaning that becomes it not:

You commit yourself in several thousand ways

That are not come to be, not yet –

Unseeing you have picked apart your web;

You have undone yourself, and do not know it.

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… all other Edwards are naught, in the king’s exultation at his heir: he stands over the cradle, marvelling at what God has bestowed. But then he remembers the queen, a husk now eviscerated by the embalmers, tapers burning day and night around her bier, the prayers never ceasing, the syllables pit-pattering, the sorrows and joys of Our Lady, her mysteries, her worship and praise.

The Mirror and the Light, 520

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Dying and living

are not what they should be,

in this world of fools:

Hope is birthed and broken

while the queen follows

all the dead

into the dark

dreaming of light.

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O the edge, the knife-edge

of the light that pierces

and the shards of glass that lie beneath;

Your face is the face you see in them

uncanny with the distance:

The fall it lies between you

And the appointed day, yet it comes

Slow and sure, the promise of pain

But not just yet.

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The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:

The Journal Wk. 28