Love’s Labor’s Won: Prologue
Love’s Labor’s Won. Prologue. War
This text is featured in our interview with Scott Kaiser.
Click here for a scanned version.
WAR
- Nay, do not run—for thou dost know me well;
- Though now my clothes are torn, and my grim visage
- Arrayed in blood. ’Twas only four years since
- That thou didst take my hand and welcome me.
- Why, is not this the very place that thou
- Didst fold me in thy open arms, and kissed
- My rosy cheeks, and praised my bearing much,
- Swearing oaths and waving flags as I marched by?
- And dost thou now not know me? O for shame!
- Why, thou didst polish bright my silver buttons,
- And sharpen my worn sword, and fill my purse
- With borrowed gold and new-collected treasure.
- And dost thou now not recognize my face?
- I am war, the pandemonious child
- You once adored, born in the self-same hour,
- And in that same contagious bed whereon
- The last French King commanded his last breath,
- Whose sickness, carried on the wanton breeze,
- Infected intertwined alliances
- As fragile as a widow spider’s web,
- Infesting all the fecund courts of Europe
- With deadly enmity. For four long years
- I’ve toiled for thy glory without rest,
- Deafening sons with my thunderous voice,
- Defiling daughters with my fiery fists,
- Trampling villages with my cruel boots,
- Starving children with my greedy stomach,
- Bereaving fathers with my stony heart,
- Widowing wives with my venomous breath,
- Divorcing bodies from their timeless souls,
- And all in loving and devoted service
- To thy most deep and secretive desires;
- And dost thou now disown me? Call me bastard?
- Spit out my bitter name? Well, ’tis no matter:
- I know thou shalt despair when I am gone,
- Which soon may come to pass, for now, alas,
- The fickle coronets of Spain and France
- Do court in Paris, where they woo and dance,
- United by desire to conceive
- A fetal treaty that will banish me
- From out the skirts of these deflower’d lands.
- But what care I if they expel me hence?
- For I’m in great demand on every plot
- Of this contentious ball of wormy earth;
- Pretend then, henceforth, not to know my birth;
- A round or two my labors here shall cease,
- While Time gestates my witless sibling, peace.