The Dead Infantas. Parts One & Two & Coda..A Dark Fairytale for our Times. (Completed Poem).

              
                    Part One.
           The Dead Infantas.


It is a time of ruined cities,
Of silent streets haunted by lone foxes.
Of palace gardens wrecked by hail and frost
Under the mournful gaze of dead Infantas.
It is a time of pestilence and ransacked churches;
Thieves smashing doors to steal the sacraments.

Rotting daffodils hang their tattered flags
Over a moss green mere of tangled leaves. -
In another corner of the palace gardens
Purple tulips, shaped like communion cups,
Raise scented prayers up to the soft blue sky.
The communion cups are lacking wine and water,
The snow grey clouds that cross from time to time
The moist eye of the April sun,
Dapple the empty bowls with icy shadows.
Bees and moths die when they touch these shadows.

The souls of the dead Infantas float unseen
Between the corpses of the winter flowers
That slowly turn to mush as days grow long.
When they were flesh and blood these sad princesses
Never learned to look beyond the giant mirrors
That iced their palace walls.
Their whole world seemed to be a burnished surface
That reflected nothing but their inbred faces,
Their painted lips, their haunted mermaid eyes.

The communion cups are magicked into bells
That chime ethereal warnings of unease
As the restless souls of the dead Infantas glide
Between the moss green leaves.
They all died childless, the mirrored walls impassive
To the sobs and shrieks of inconsolable women
Crying out to glimpse the Son behind thick veils.
But remorseless shadows rose high like the tides.
Rose like spring tides pounding empty beaches
While the priests and servers murmured Nunc Dimittis.

Once the cooling bodies had been anointed.
Once the final prayers were softly spoken,
The cramped souls of the dead Infantas fled
Out of the sickroom, into the fields and gardens,
That protocol had barred them from exploring
During their sheltered lives.
"This is heaven", they whispered to themselves.
But as they touched the plants, and stared, and wondered,
The green leaves changed to brown, the blossoms tumbled.

Rotting daffodils hang their tattered flags
Over a moss green mere of tangled leaves.

                             *

                     Part Two.
             Sleeping Beauties.


The dead Infantas glide on silent wings
That gently lift their spirit bodies
Like webs of blown silk
Upon the misty breath of April winds.

Their flimsy wings catch on the twisted thorns
Of ancient briar roses
That in summer will be weighted down with blossoms
Darker than the darkest ruby wine.

Caught on the thorns the dead Infantas weave
Ghost cocoons with their saddest memories
That slowly fade as they rock themselves to sleep.
Slowly fade like delicate pencil sketches.

And what do they dream,
If they have the power to dream
In the heavy scents of the shady palace gardens?
The gardens they never walked when they were children.

Do they dream of pampered lives bereft of meaning
Trapped by protocol and artifice?
Do they dream of food banks, junkies and rough sleepers,
So often reviled on the palace intranet?

I suspect if they dream at all in their realm of shadow,
Its of billionaire princes on Lippizaner horses
Who will one night bludgeon a path through the maze of thorns
To wake them with a kiss.
                             
                             *

                         Coda.

The Dead Infantas do not dream,
No folk are left to grieve in their crumbling palaces,
To dig the graves, to light the pyres and ovens,
To shovel ashes over silent fields.
The Dead Infantas have passed into a darkness
Darker that the furthest tracts of space.

Centuries under earth their bodies rot,
The gardens they once loved are now wild forests
Roamed by creatures they could never name,
Wise denizens of a verdant paradise,
A brand new Eden red in tooth and claw
Incubated in the world wide great extinction.

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief
Have all rotted into mush and ashes,
Even their ghosts have vanished from the forests
That now entwine their frivolous civilisation.
All that the Dead Infantas understood
Has self annihilated, transfigured into dust.

The billionaires, the oil men, the presidents and kings
Have killed the world they made, and every human in it.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter.
27th. - 28th. - 30th. March 2020, Part One.
1st. - 4th.April 2020. Part Two.
3rd. June 2020. Coda. 

The only way I could react at first  to self isolation during the covid19 pandemic has been to respond to the surreal and dangerous situation by digging deep into the fiercely dark fairy tale legends that I read in my childhood and have haunted my imagination ever since.