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| The Queen receiving Carol Ann Duffy at Buckingham Palace shortly after Duffy became the poet laureate in 2009. |
Former poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy shares poem to mark Queen’s passing
Poem entitled Daughter written in tribute to Queen Elizabeth II
Monday 19 September 2022
Carol Ann Duffy, the former poet laureate – who was appointed by the Queen in 2009 – has written a poem entitled Daughter, shared exclusively here, to mark the monarch’s death.
DAUGHTER
Your mother’s daughter, you set your face
to the road
that ran by the river; behind you, the castle,
its mute ballroom,
lowered flag. Stoic, your profile a head on a coin,
you followed the hearse
through sorrow’s landscape- a farmer, stood
on a tractor,
lifting his tweed cap; a group of anglers
shouldering their rods.
And now the villagers, silently raising
their mobile phones.
Then babies held aloft in the towns, to one day
be told they were there.
But you had your mother’s eyes, as a horse ran free
in a field;
a pheasant flared from a hedge
like a thrown bouquet;
journeying on through a harvest of strange love.
How they craned to glimpse their lives again
in her death; reminded
of Time’s relentless removals, their own bereavements,
as she passed.
The uplift of the high bridge over a dazzle of water;
a sense of ascending
into anointing light which dissolved into cloud.
Nine more slow grey miles to the Old Town; the last mile
a royal mile,
where they gathered ten-deep as your mother showed you
what she had meant.
Nightfall and downpour near London. Even the motorways paused;
thousands of headlights in rain
as you shadowed her still; smatterings of applause
from verges and bridges.
Soon enough they would come to know this had long been
the Age of Grief;
that History was ahead of them. The crown of ice melting
on the roof of the world.
Tonight, childhood’s palace; the iPhone torches linking back
to medieval flame.
So you slowed and arrived with her, her only daughter,
and only her daughter.
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