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.
Copyright Credit: James K. Baxter, "To a Print of Queen Victoria" from Selected Poems. Copyright © 2010 by The James K. Baxter Trust. Reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press, Ltd.
Source: Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, Ltd., 1979)