SECOND
The Wedding Guest
Kathleen Jones (Appleby, Cumbria, UK)
Liz Berry: Another poem I loved from first reading. The poet conjures a wonderful lucid voice here and uses it to tell a beguiling story of a century of change, of rise and fall. Fantastic stuff.
The Wedding Guest
I was a Princess, I tell you!
Queen of an old country.
I have roared through
grubby towns
in a first class carriage.
I have been intimate with whalebone, and worn
small-clothes of silk and lawn.
At my wedding
I wore a lace so fine, a generation
of women went blind in the making of it.
Two goats gave their unborn kids
for my soft, white slippers.
I had a waiting woman once for every orifice
and I laid myself down in clean linen
perfumed with lavender
for the service of my country
and gave birth on straw and hessian
for the same cause.
At Ekaterinburg, the servants
lay down in the mud for me to walk on.
At Versailles I had a little dog
who looked at me
with mournful eyes.
But my birthright has been lost
in the small print of history
and I have been so hungry
I have broken my teeth
on a salad of rubies and emeralds.
A bellyful of diamonds
does nothing for you.
Since then I have stared down the bore of a gun
as if through an optic glass to the future
where the guards wear grey uniforms
and I am in hard shoes, carrying my own
luggage.
My bed is stone
under a quilt of newsprint.
If you wait for a moment, I will tell you my story.
I was a Princess!
Queen of an old country . . . .”
poem © Kathleen Jones