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Perception

Vern Fein

Poor Marie.
From your balcony
you didn’t really shout
at the waving, hungry
pitch forks, staves:
“Let them eat cake!.”
did you?

You were not that stupid
to open your privilege
to those starving peasants?
You did not scream
those haughty words, did you?

But they said you did,
orchestrated orgies in Versailles,
slept with your son,
pilfered millions for your native Austria.

Sent you to the horrid guillotine,
more humane than drawing and quartering
frantic horses ripping the dying,
gutted body asunder.

Dignity on the way to that blade,
dressed in widow white,
ignored the jeering crowds,
ignored the assigned priest
perched beside you as the tumbril
rolled its hour toward your death,
unlike the carriage provided your husband.

Dickens celebrated Madame DeFarge,
knitting as the crowd remembered
her dead child, trampled
by the aristocrat’s carriage
mixing her son’s blood
with the wine she sold the rich.
DeFarge howled when you tripped
over the executioner’s shoe.

 
When the bloodthirsty peasants
screamed for your head, cheered
when those beautiful eyes glazed dead,
body pitched into a pauper’s grave,
face later a Tussaud wax mask,
the cake was not what mattered,
was it, poor Marie?

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