…With one last roar of bitterness and pain,

King March lets go, of his life as he knew it,

of everything that went before and understood

Lord Tiresias’ wise words

that were concerned with pleasure.

“Pleasure, not this agony of Regal state in which

My subjects below me run into shadows, hide in corners

and bow to me because I force them too, because

I am damned to always believe them to be

nothing more than baseless, they do not understand the

relating pressure I feel as lord of this once

paradise covered in blossom, now sinking

in my own cousin’s Spring’s wet despairing upheaval.”

 

“As Lord, I hold no sway and I want them to be happy,

I would like them to be free and enjoy life, to feel the sun

upon their necks and the glory of passionate love,

a love that has by passed me because my own self

has been ignored, such has been my Winter fury.”

 

Tiresias,

the cleverest soul in King March’s land,

but one raised

with tact as well as a penchant for speaking

the truth, looked upon his King and smiled,

for who would

not when the patient finds their

own answer to the life torn,

struggle filled question that has been gnawing

at the back of their minds since the day they were born,

a question of nature, not nurture, for March

in his youth had been surrounded by nothing more

than the glory of his ancestors, the male pride,

cut short, always and forever and when

the subjects below had all been decreed

to die, their own shadows bleached by the fury

of an expanding, dying sun, March must always become

April, March will always pass over to give April…life.

 

March will be reborn, the year with instinctive belief

will renew and the shadow, for nine months at least,

will be of one only seen in small flashes, not the constant

night of the troubled King, driven mad

because he refused to believe that it was true,

he must and will become these women of April,

May and June and feel the compassion that

such a transformation will complete.

 

March slips slowly into waking coma, one final

roar of false masculine pride, one final belch of a hardy

hunted dinner, and quietly waits to wake up new.

 

Ian D. Hall