Cruel, in the way only the confident can be cruel, she looses
tumultuous multitudes, schools them in violence, sings
destruction over a city’s grave. Some call her queen, or witch,
or temptress, but she answers to none, her name continually
erased from the lore that spawns her. True power needs
no name, data points and anecdotes churning in endless
permutations to make her faces—or the masks
which conceal and reveal a whirl of identities,
each as false as the last, every one true in some corrupt
and careless way—and true power mocks piteous cries
for power has no pity, no conscience. Lessons of gods
taught her that, back before the world understood
time, when stars danced in their constellations
and angels gathered pins, putting their heads together
to whisper creation’s secrets in the ears of demons.
Cruel being, unbending and arrogant, she twists
existence around her fingers and plays with lives
like a game of cat’s cradle, hands weaving disasters
as she peers into the night. Stars form patterns,
assure her of her beauty, her magnificence,
the slow and painful decay of her enemies
in the crumbling structures of their envy. Endings
weave from beginnings, eschatology begotten
by the first breath entering the world,
and she smiles, baring teeth as sharp as the light
that settles on her shoulders, a cape of menace
more troubling than the darkness at the heart
of galaxies and goddesses.