To a Print of Queen Victoria

I advise rest; the farmhouse we dug you up in has been modernized, and the people who hung you as their ikon against the long passage wall are underground — Incubus and excellent woman, we inherit the bone acre of your cages and laws. This dull green land suckled at your blood’s frigor Anglicanus, crowning with a housewife’s tally the void of Empire, does not remember you — and certain bloody bandaged ghosts rising from holes of Armageddon at Gallipoli or Sling Camp, would like to fire a shot through the gilt frame. I advise rest, Madam; and yet the tomb holds much that we must travel barely without. Your print — ‘from an original pencil drawing by the Marchioness ‘of Granby, March, eighteen nine- ty seven…’ Little mouth, strong nose and hooded eye — they speak of half-truths my type have slung out of the window, and lack and feel the lack too late. Queen, you stand most for the time of early light, clay roads, great trees unfelled, and the smoke from huts where girls in sack dresses stole butter . . . The small rain spits today. You smile in your grave.