When I was a girl,
dreams filled my heart like air in a balloon,
pressing taut against the edges till I rose
into the clouds. A swoon of desire fizzed
through my veins, the thirsty energy of youth.
I would marry a man I loved, I thought,
and love would spill down the line of unborn babes,
the sap of a tree beating through its branches,
filling the fruit with sweetness.
When I was a girl,
I knew I wouldn’t be an empress. I would guide
the power towards the people. My beloved
father didn’t know how much they hated him.
Cage-born, cage-bred, its brittle golden bars
bound tight as iron shackles. No breaking free
from that destiny. I saw the blood,
saw it rage up to the palace gates, flood
the world, already pulped by war.
When I was a girl,
we floated, bland and blind, in a cauldron
of the world’s despair. I knew it before
Father Grigori’s funeral, just as I knew
that tense-eyed mystic peasant was a mistake,
an influence asking to be killed. They say,
in the cold cities of later decades,
that we lived in splendour, luxury—
jewelled lives like Faberge eggs—
when I was a girl,
but I slept on a soldier’s camp-bed, took cold
baths every morning, nursed the wounded
when the world burned. We loved each other,
and I—Cassandra—knew what our fate would be.
Through our captivity, I couldn’t eat.
My bones rose through my flesh and sleep fled.
Alexei, already ill, was carried to his bayonetted rest.
They shot Tatiana through the back of her head.
When I was a girl,
I was, finally, shot through the jaw, cowering
with my sister against a wall. My father died first,
died easiest. Anger and hatred smashed
our world apart, fear that we would rise from exile,
an eternal spark, re-seed some magic mark of monarchy
in years to come. What was left was found,
a century later, rotting in the forested ground,
exposing the imposters. I blaze over wooded miles,
over silent snow, adrift in a haze of horror.
I wish this land would let me go. I was still a child,
my butterfly wings still wet and weak
inside their chrysalis, when they switched me off,
when they stamped on me, when they turned
those childish days of games and prayer—
the pink dress that I wore to my sixteenth birthday ball—
into pointless, dusty, aimless memories
of when I was a girl.
[Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna of Russia was the eldest of the five children of Tzar Nicholas II of Russia and his wife Alexandra Feodorovna. She was executed by the Bolsheviks, by firing squad, along with the rest of her family and their servants, on July 17, 1918, at Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Siberia. She was 22 when she died]
