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| Second Poem on the Underground - Gerald Parker |
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The morning train is crowded
and a young Cassandre is being
urged to go with Pierre de Ronsard
in the evening to see if a purple rose
has lost the petals which were so fresh
like her this morning, and it has, alas,
being as ephemeral as a young girl’s
beauty, and the scheming Pierre
knows it has even before they reach it.
‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose….’ indeed,
(losing a je ne sais quoi in translation.)
Cassandre de Salviati, aged thirteen,
and married off the following year,
did she ever give twenty-year old
Pierre de Ronsard a second thought,
ever read this ode dedicated to her,
in the first edition of his Amours emblazoned
with her engraving and nippled cones for breasts?
And today’s young Cassie, office-bound,
does she give this poem a second thought,
if discovered like a resplendent rose amongst briars
of suspended arms swaying with the train?
But perhaps she needs no urging
from some guy called Pierre,
and what began at a royal ball in 1545
in the Château de Blois as a frisson
in a young poet’s mind, to reverberate
for centuries with Renaissance joie-de-vivre,
is just some effin’ French git
goin’ on about a bleedin’ rose.
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