(At the remote Mayerling hunting lodge,
on January 30, 1889, two young people’s
lives were extinguished. Crown Prince
Rudolf, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,
and his young lover, Countess Mary Vetsera,
died in circumstances which have never been
properly explained.)
The Tragedy of Mayerling
In January, eighteen eighty-nine,
disaster struck the Austrian court, and since
that day, we've wondered how the handsome prince
(one Rudolf) and his teenage concubine
came both to die. A mystery which taxes
the best of Europe's brains is long past solving.
A story of illicit love, involving
the need to smash down bedroom doors with axes
will always fascinate. The girl was found
in bed, quite dead. Prince Rudolf at her side
was sitting in a chair. It seems he died
of gunshot wounds. Blood - clotted, matted, browned
- extended its congealing cataract
down to the floor. Perhaps a suicide pact?
His poems live deep down in the wood
down in an olde hunting lodge
They are brown as the bears head that
hangs on the wall
brown as the dark leaves that fall
silently hiding the salt lick
from fawns who come in
the twilight to call
His poetry growls and grumbles and purrs
like a cougar alone on the rim
of the canyon above the olde
hunting grounds
where he writes all his lines
like a hymn
His poems stretch out on the furs
by the fire
and tell of the storms and the waves
that tested the strength of the words
that inspire
and sent many songs to their graves
for brave are the sagas
the odes that survive
the trek through the woods to the town
and as we go home we gather them up
scattered like leaves on the ground.
Brown,yellow,red ,a few of them green
His poems are places and things we have seen
but not from the view that the truth hunter gives
deep down in the woods ,where poetry lives
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