Sir Thomas Cromwell - poem
Sir Thomas Cromwell poempoem – after watching Mark Rylance in Wolf Hall based on Hilary Mantell’s novel.
In mental processes, the reformation
Of one’s perception, how the stage
Of characters filled with whom you love or hate
Revolves, the set and plots change
When you hold dearly to one old notion
The serpent of words or deeds slivers out
To poison the identification or admiration
So with Chamber’s Sir Thomas More the man
For all seasons, is destroyed by the adage
All power must in the end end the government
By love, honesty, caring and sharing, the body
Must be judged not by the high and pious thought
Which cannot be racked or wormed into corruption
But by the relations to this world, the unsaintly
Sentence to death, the beating of the weak servant
Hence then the absurd, the bleakness of despair
Which like the rowing of Anne to the tower for her
Final hour, in the complicity, the loyaly to a crime
Officiating over deaths, like the good Eichman
In the power of bureaucracy the loss of shame
Until the sword falls, then the players in the mind
Which were once vehicles, now take the account
Through the complex, the heart seeks the garden
But even in the Eden, must the Emperor or king
Steal your convictions, must he take the key –wind
You up, motor your motivations, for your career
Needs to be watered and tended by despotism
How easily did the hero succumb to the awful power
In the tide of history and its religious tenor – fly from
The fair and just, to act only in view of bloody miscarriage
The visceral sign of failed reproduction and taunt
To masculinity, so then the pretext to find a charge
Here the rhetoric and laws couple to make a monster
As the hero fails, the mirror broadcasts the crime
So the piety of the protestant is burnt by blame
In this fiction, the camera pimps the dramatic irony
Which has us discard our textbooks into the dumpster
Whether too much leeway has been given to TV
And the ratings, or whether it remains faithful
To the novel, is immaterial, it is the chapel
Of our own world in which we must light and blow
Out the candles, in our reaction like Cromwell
Our own faith and convictions are sorely tested
When in December there is no longer any snow
Or turn in bed and find a love is now completely dead
Or discover a friendship which held as true navigation
Has steered away, further and further, the phone
Doesn’t bleat, then you remember, your own faults
Which on a line squeal then dispatched by denial
The blood runs, curdles, until it passes under the pillow
Everything held dearly, a dog dogs you with her death
An aunt who you cherished is reduced in time to caricature
The selfless devotion is reinterpreted as malicious motivation
What was the Christmas of the past, is tried and judged by the future
The beautiful is rubbished by the claim of the heinous hegemony
In which the opposites thrive, take a plus and it is cast out as a minus
Like witchhunters, we drag out history and torture the facts into fiction
So then a monument falls, a blessed Sir Thomas More loses his humanity
But in closer and more intimate scale, the actions of the loved one
Is seen in repeated replay of something once trivial now a clue
As a bitten fingernail signals the unseen and uncharted relation
Was it love or simply habit, was it love or simply convenience
Was it love or simply expedience, was it ever more, ever more?
Then the practice of experience like a well-played tune
Has you all ears, wanting to get to the bottom of all things
You investigate, remember before rejection the notice of a clock
During the time you lovemake, this in retrospect had you moon
Over each event, each tiny gesture, each word, taking stock
Like Cromwell at court, then the players wore a masquerade
You wonder, you fear the charade. It is then you become the stoic
Where the tree fallen, the baby on the beach, the end of a romance
The treachery of friends, the idiocy of literal religion, is tragic
Yet, as the puppet of power, somehow you must sing and dance.