The Queen Is Dead

I’ve felt it too – in the news you shouldn’t know
from the local magpie, his informant’s signals,
in the stubbed toe, in the but-there’s-a-but,
in this magic weather you can’t trust.

A plane too high or fast to trail a shadow
casts its din like an enchantment;
in its wake, the city blinks, clicks its joints,
cranes its green gaze towards a prince’s vapour.

A strange cortege: here come the thuggish squirrels,
the men with ladders and nightmares,
the mooching weekday cars with their tiaras –
absentee fathers, dreaming their lives away.

Sam Riviere’s most recent collection of poems, Conflicted Copy, was published in June

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