How to Make a King
There is an old fable, it could be true, that tells
of kings in Medieval Europe who have a leg
or a hip ritually broken before taking the throne.
He would forever travel with a stiffening limp, that king,
the slowness and unsteadiness his leg created would
remind him of the common people, whom he ruled.
An understanding and a knowing pity for those
who have little grew as roots from his labored
walking, his cane buttressing him like cathedral walls.
This was his sacrifice. We can say that a crown,
like a lion, is reserved for someone who has fully
arrived, is incarnate, sanguinely embodied.
The many years it takes to inhabit graciously such a
form, suggests that to be an elder of any type, to be regally
present in this world, means that you never appear
At your throne without a limp, a broken smile, a marriage
wasted, a child who’s missing or estranged, or a few
big things you would have rather not taken for granted.
If this story rings true, then this is how royalty is made:
being removed of something so valuable, we learn to give
over a life, the very things we perceive we have lost.