Peacock Island
From the island he saw the castle and from the castle he saw the island. Some people live this way—wife/ mistress/wife/mistress. But this story isn’t the one I’m telling. From the island he saw the castle and that made him distant from power and from the castle he saw the island and that made him distant from imagining what power can do. The story I’m telling is the war coming. How can you go from island to castle to island to castle and not give birth to a war? No. I still can’t explain it.
Copyright © 2018 by Jennifer Kronovet. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 23, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Peacock Island is a real place: sixty-seven hectares in the middle of the Havel River, just off the western edge of Berlin—after a thirty-second ferry ride you’re there and can hear the peacocks screaming to each other. The island was once given to an alchemist who discovered how to make ruby glass but was shipped off when his lab burned down, and one hundred years later, the island was given to the king’s mistress for her pleasure, and she was shipped off when the king died. The castle, the fountain, and the temple were all designed to look like ruins—the fantasy of ruin—and yet were untouched when World War II's bombs fell. When I first went to Peacock Island I thought, if I can understand this place, I can understand all of the real and imagined history of Western civilization. This place of artifice and hubris snagged me, and since then all my poems have been about Peacock Island.”
—Jennifer Kronovet