The Queens

Scholars have said the Irish Queens

had ice-blue eyes and long hair

the red of chestnuts that streamed out

on the wind from the small heads,

keen-boned, proud, and in the rain

with darker fires and sheenings burned

so that men fell before them, kissed

the small hard feet, the purple sag

of braid-twined hems, and never thought

them less than fatal women. So

the scholars gossip, gripped like boys

by the magniloquent, and yet

when Deirdre rode between two men

I wonder if hearts did not break

at that smile of self-mockery which

outdiced the fates and lost the world.