Sample Poems by Eve Wood
Catherine of Aragon, January 31, 1510
Born in the stillness of an early hour
made you still.
A female child is no loss
to those who stand beside the bed,
lifting the ermine mantle, heavy
with blood, to hold
the baby by the ankles
and carry it from the room.
I'll come to this again —
cold lathered girl they pull out
of me
who would not part with God.
Anne Boleyn, July 23, 1535
I found a tooth in the road,
near Hampstead
where the hounds fly, unharnessed,
and the single lame whippet
whose white face comes together
in two brown continents.
Something about it was unsound,
the tooth there
in the center of my palm, blanched
and unholy, as though grown
from the false paleness
of my skin, lotioned with nettle-seed, cinnabar.
The dogs raged in the fields,
shooting their tight bodies through the grass,
but I couldn't move
from where I had chosen to stand,
not knowing how the tooth
dropped there,
a dog's or a man's,
or the giant, marauding fish
that rises daily
from the deep blue ground,
in search of me.
Jane Seymour, January 12, 1537
I love best the one tree in the garden that dies daily.
A low hanging monument to God
that will not lift itself,
I wonder if the air around it is infected,
or the birds
with hemlock on their breath,
breathe there.
A piece of loose bark
folds into itself
like the tiny hand of a dead baby.
Cut the tree down,
and it will come back as a voice.
You can hear it
carried along
when the wind is high.
It's the same sound a child makes
coming up for breath
in a pool of deep water.
The tree that is the voice
tells the garden it's gone missing,
but the only reply the garden knows
is the springing of new life.
Katherine Howard, March 2, 1540
Lies are my utopia, flashes
of nothingness inside a sacred place,
and I can't elongate the distance
between myself and his body.
I won't stay away.
His lips give their verdict,
and who am I to live
only for this?
Six drops of peach juice behind his ears,
as he lies sleeping.
Believe me when I say
I won't stop.