To Their Own Kind of Trumpet

Written in Edinburgh while sitting on a stone wall

overlooking Holyrood Palace

Oh why should it seem so especially a pity that the pretty women

Mary Stuart

Marie Antoinette should have lost their heads?

Is it because the heads were pretty as flowers on stems? Or because giddy as Catherine Howard's? Or - with such spirit - to the last breath lifted like Anne Boleyn's to protest so unfair

so unfair an end?

Or is it because however frivolous or at fault they were among the shifting schemes of all those men

the pretty women (who perhaps like us could shriek

if startled by a mere mouse) are said to have walked proud at the last?

And to have bowed only as a queen bows.