Poetry for Charlotte
A baby safely born is always joy:
The labour overtaken by relief,
The skirling cry, no matter girl or boy,
A presence still not quite beyond belief.
This is the stuff of life that we all share,
Determining not what but that we are:
But sense of it’s then dulled with daily wear,
Perception’s doors being left at best ajar.
So when the press of every day makes space
To greet in celebration this new birth,
We are acknowledging what’s taken place
As regal symbol of our human worth.
It is to that idea that we respond:
The royal event proclaims a common bond.
By
W.J. Webster
So, fourth in line — the Cambridge line indeed,
tracing across the landscape something new
and unusurpable, and history’s need
to hold the female train secure and true.
Grant her a cot, a plot, a face, a space
for hiding, holding, huddling, making sound
those infant needs yet met with royal grace
to set her infant feet on common ground.
Let her, unwombed, feel time fall like the sun
of highest summer on her childhood smiles
when what she thinks stays locked and not undone —
an undreamed future, all adorned meanwhile
with innocence. The future holds enough,
and more, in dead-weight — paparazzi, press,
the roughest riding rough-shod o’er the rough;
grant her these few days’ peace, this sheltered-ness.
By
D.A. Prince
I think of Apple Charlotte, Charlotte’s Web:
A wholesome name, more middle class than deb.
These days the royals must be just like us
We want them ordinary, with little fuss.
No jewelled dresses like the Virgin Queen.
That type of spending would just look obscene.
No ermine-covered prams, vicuna shawls
Or diamond rattles to pacify her bawls.
No welcome with a special laureate’s sonnet,
Just pictured in the tabloids in a bonnet.
By
Fiona Pitt-Kethley
The lullabies of sudden shutters:
The hummed hymns of the paparazzi —
Listen how each camera sputters,
Whirrs for you, you little Gatsby:
How the crowd of nosey-pokers
Cranes its necks to see your stillness —
Tries to bring you into focus.
One day you’ll think this an illness —
But rest a while, before the phrases
Cynics bring you fill your thinking:
Here you breathe, all time in stasis,
Gently shifting, sensing, blinking —
Royally at ease, ignore us,
All too happy when you’re keening;
Never mind the constant chorus
Filling you with perfect meaning.
By
Bill Greenwell
