Poetic Licence: A Portrait of the Queen
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Your support makes all the difference.Her Majesty has had her picture done and her house taken to the cleaners by `Holiday Which?'
Standing on a landing
By a barley-twisted balustrade
Weirdly nearly beautiful
In ermine, jewel and crown
As ancestors look down
To see a queen in winter
With the hoar-frost on her hair
Ghostly in composure
And that melancholy air
Born of duty and despair
"One is frozen Mr Festing
For posterity or not."
Says the monarch to the artist
As she gazes to the right
From the shadows into light
But the artist was a soldier
With the former soldier's eye
For her rheumy two retainers
Stood in semi-expectaton
Of some hun-and-gate equation
Their halberd spikes point upwards
At the forbears sat behind her
But her grizzled guards at elbow
Must allow that she's fared better
Than Charles and Henrietta
Then the frost sets hard upon her
While the people tramp her palace
And the cloak upon her shoulders
Trails the darkness at her feet
For the portrait is complete.
"One is frozen Mr Festing
For posterity or no."
Then white as late December
With the moonlight on the snow,
The subject turns to go.
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