You must alter yourself, or we shan’t
have happy lives.
Oh, the surety of Edwardian wisdom.
Imperious as their beloved dead Queen,
these sisterly words (from wise to foolish)
still convey a heft: We’re in this together,
basis of all girl-talk, what traces its way
back to some cave or, okay, just outside—
two squat females with honed slate
scraping flesh from a yet-warm hide
while multi-tasking, softly conspiring
for their greater good, swapping notes
regarding his temper, how to avoid it,
their only tools a coded eye-roll,
a whispered heads-up like the above,
Margaret’s wish that Helen dump her project,
her protégée, the sad-sack cockney clerk,
Helen’s urge to better him a burden,
a leaden yoke on their shared neck,
Margaret’s words so the same as Krishna’s
when Arjuna declared he would not fight,
swaths of the Gita devoted to this:
Warriors war . . . because that is their station.
Same as poor clerks must hold situations,
same as Forster must write and (if we believe
Naipaul) have his way with Bengali boys
before living on . . . even through the ‘60s,
the time-traveler outside whose window
a strange, empire-less England swung . . .
Mods, Rockers, Stones and Twiggys in full swirl,
Helen’s rejection of class gone global—
all of us still lifting our eyes unto the hills,
but our help these days cometh from within.
We dream, we parade, we weep, we bugger.
We’re still not quite there. We want happy lives.
