High Posts From the Low Countries

When Princess

Your courtly, gifted, heavy intellect
has brought me to my knees.
In space defined by colour
all your artifice has flown
like tower guardians in visions
of the damdedest castle fall.

Plaintains scent the spirit's air
with envy from another conflict
and doctrine fails its aims
against your father's wish,
the sweet device of
Catholic Honesty.

The broken palace falls in shade
at your captivity;
The politics of sisterhood
have broken in the face
of all ancestral blindness
and these gentle cousin's wars.

And to your book, we fall;
what tiny scrap marks interest?
and how the early details fire
some deep, deep ranging thought,
some European image
of familial religion.