He chopped my head off.
He wanted a son and I gave him a girl
I miscarried twice and one was a boy
It was an unforgivable sin.
So desperate for an heir was he
He evicted the Pope from England
And created his own kind of church
So he could get rid of Catherine,
The mother of his daughter,
And have me, against my own will.
My sister was not enough for him-
A mistress can not be a queen -
And the successor he so keenly longed for
Must be the issue of a queen.

With 2 daughters, Henry needed a son.
Catherine gave him Mary
And I bore him Elizabeth.
He didn’t know - nobody could know
How that rivalry would one day end.
When Henry looked to Jane Seymour,
Something told me I would die.
Hoping for kindness, it was brutality instead,
And Henry fell into a chain of desperation.
With seven murdered wives as links.

He chopped off my head to clear the way
For marriage number three
And buried me in a leaden box
In his ongoing quest for sons.
He thought that was the end of me
But my daughter was made of my same stuff
And through her battles over time
She claimed the throne that once was mine
And the Elizabethan era came to be.
ljm

A trip down
The memory lane
Of simpler times
And happier days
Rekindling those vibes
With a few pals of mine,
The old tales of summer
Jumping around,
Even in pain,
Chasing ice cream trucks
On our bikes
For our favourite flavours
The old tales of winter
Trying to look cool,
Cracking lame jokes
Exhaling,
What we used to pretend
Was smoke
This conversation was special
I was out of touch
But not out of time,
For the very first time

when we feel strong emotion
we often have no words
that seem to fit our commotion
we coo and chirp like do the birds
   or moo like cattle in their herds
and only gradually we find
the words connecting soul and mind
so we can speak our feeling
rather than reeling
   speechless
in some unspoken power’s bind

* * *

It's all trial and error;
weighing heavy on
the latter.
When I feel like this,
I want to build an
exit machine;
walk through it to
a different life.
Too many irons in
the fire, I'm burned
beyond recognition.
The situation unfolds
like it always does,
I fall down, and
then get back up.
But I'm tired, and sometimes
the ground is comfortable,
and way too familiar.