King

His queen is lost, his mirror-self.
Each looking glass must be reversed.
He looks inward, as if into a well
fed by a stream darker than earth.
A fragment lodges in his mind,
a glass thorn deep as a tap root:
he'll stop, and reverse, time — mis-take
his daughter for her dead mother.
His counsellors cite texts, intone
prophecies. In gilded galleries
they form knots of desperate
whispering… Straw in the wind.