Sur des châles jonches l’Empereur marche, noir / et propre (Arthur Rimbaud)
Quarried bricks at Kings Dyke stack up next the tracks
like your idiot subjects, blood of rack-rent and iron teeth—
a specious feudal alchemy for which they’d eat their own
children to touch the foot of your high street dress. My Duchess!
How you have plunged us into a medieval darkness, and fretful
sale bins, rummaging for an ovarian image of royal material
with which to hide the gnarls of our education, spinsterhood,
real talent that plagues women of a certain generation. Alas,
if there’s anything better than aiming for something it’s surely
aiming for nothing, dimpled in antique lace stitched to silk
hauled from the white mucosal bowels of privilege. I hope
they chopped the expert hands off those poor seamstresses
like the Mughal did after his slaves finished the Taj Mahal—
I hope your ladies-in-waiting sacrificed each to your fertility—
lined up round your ritual bedchamber, hissing with the black
laughter of women who only ever birth princes. The floral chorus
waves their merciless ancient symbols as you ascend sylph-like
into the plain air above them, buttressed by a stock of deranged
hopefuls, my sisters, our mothers, towering skyward in fever.
Sandeep Parmar