The Prince to Snow White by Polly Peterson

(in response to Snow White and the Prince by Delia Sherman )


Did you think that I found you

by chance, Maiden?

Did you believe

I was drawn to your crystal casket,

like a hummingbird to its nectar,

by the allure of ruby lips,

the gaze of azure eyes?

The mirror told your mother,

at forty,

what she already knew,

not in her heart,

but in her spleen.

"Take her into the forest,"

she commanded,

"for her heartbeat plays

the music of my mortality,

and must be stopped."

Still the mirror

told her true.

She was the fading flower —

a fresh blossom

opened in you.

Ragged she came,

and gnarled and stooped,

hoping by this guise

to fool fate,

to quell the crone within.

Her apple froze you fast —

a talisman

to keep time

from touching her.

Alas, to no avail.

You shall have

your mother's love.

Indeed, you have it now,

even as you

usurp her place.

Did you think that I found you

by chance, Maiden?

You are beautiful, sublime,

yet not so lovely

as our daughter will be:

your mother's daughter's child —

her immortality.

Snow White to the Prince by Delia Sherman

I am beautiful you say, sublime,

Black and crystal as a winter's night,

With lips like rubies, cabochon,

My eyes deep blue as sapphires.

I cannot blame you for your praise:

You took me for my beauty, after all;

A jewel in a casket, still as death,

A lovely effigy, a prince's prize,

The fairest in the land.

But you woke me, or your horses did,

Stumbling as they bore me down the path,

Shaking the poisoned apple from my throat.

And now you say you love me, and would wed me

For my beauty's sake. My cursed beauty.

Will you hear now why I curse it?

It should have been my mother's — it had been,

Until I took it from her.

I was fourteen, a flower newly blown,

My mother's faithful shadow and her joy.

I remember combing her hair one day,

Playing for love her tire-woman's part,

Folding her thick hair strand over strand

Into an ebon braid, thick as my wrist,

And pinned it round and round her head

Into a living crown.

I looked up from my handiwork and saw

Our faces, hers and mine, caught in the mirror's eye.

Twin white ovals like repeated moons

Bright amid our midnight hair. Our eyes

Like heaven's bowl; our lips like autumn berries.

She frowned a little, lifted hand to throat.

urned her head this way and then the other.

Our eyes met in the glass.

I saw what she had seen: her hair white-threaded,

Her face and throat fine-lined, her eyes softened

Like a mirror that clouds and cracks with age;

While I was newly silvered, sharp and clear.

I hid my eyes, but could not hide my knowledge.

Forty may be fair; fourteen is fairer still.

She smiled at my reflection, cold as glass,

And then dismissed me thankless.

Not long after the huntsman came, bearing

A knife, a gun, a little box, to tell me

My mother no longer loved me. He spared me, though,

Unasked, because I was too beautiful to kill.

And the seven little men whose house

I kept that winter and the following year,

They loved me for my beauty's sake, my beauty

That cost me my mother's love.

Do you think I did not know her,

Ragged and gnarled and stooped like a wind-bent tree,

Her basket full of combs and pins and laces?

Of course I took her poisoned gifts. I wanted

To feel her hands combing out my hair,

To let her lace me up, to take an apple

From her hand, a smile from her lips,

As when I was a child.