Baroness

after Paul S…  
 
Baroness Orczy  
(pronounced Or-tsey)  
believed in the First World War  
to a point where she aimed to enlist  
a hundred thousand women to  
encourage men to go enlist;  
she also believed  
in the innate superiority  
of aristocracy  
(I should have guessed that, I suppose,  
based on The Scarlet Pimpernel).  
 
We don’t always impose  
our own beliefs  
on those who lived  
a hundred and more years ago,  
for good reasons.  
If Hitler was a rotten sort,  
your typical German was only himself,  
and not all Englishmen, of course,  
were Oliver Cromwell’s dread consort.

The baroness was not some grand malignity,
aloft a mare of blazing, brutal history,
but merely entertainer who
had outsized influence on things.
And which of us, I sometimes ask,
can say we’d stand
for absolute humanity, equality, and love,
when those concepts took different shape,
like sweet and bitter wines brought forth
from other types of grape?