9. Entry from Ricard Kelly
A Valentine’s poetry competition for lovers of history
Niccolò
We made your name a word for cunning men,
For poison smiles and vipers dressed in silk.
But you were just a man who loved Florence,
Who watched the powerful and wrote their ilk.
You wrote The Prince in weeks, a beggar’s gift
To men who’d ruined you. You hoped for work.
They never wrote you back. You died unknown,
A disappointed, out-of-fashion clerk.
Was it satire? Science? Mirror? Manual?
Five hundred years, we still can’t decide.
You’d like that, I suspect. You always knew
Politics is guessing, dressed in pride.
We did this to you. Turned you to a knife.
Read fast, read scared, and missed the human hand
That also wrote the love notes and the jokes,
The plays, the hopes that Florence still might stand.
You were not the darkness, Niccolò.
You struck a match and said: Look. This is how it goes.
And we have never forgiven you
For showing us what everybody knows.
We were delighted to receive so many entries to this competition. We asked for a Valentine’s Day Poem with rhyming couplets written for any figure from history.
Please CLICK HERE to read all the poems and then CLICK HERE to vote.
The winner will be announced on St Valentine’s Day and will received a framed copy of their poem.
There are a few upsets of rhyming couplets: but 'the end justifies the means'?
Machiavelli! What a fascinating guy! And Catherine dei Medici, who turned out to be the principe, or principessa, for whom it was intended. Such tragedy in her life. Such tragedy she caused. What a guide to the internecine politics of Florence. I wonder what he would have made of our present world situation? What clever poems you have written.