In their element
Flowers are back outside the gates
of Kensington Palace; a sea of flowers,
tabloids say, like the sea of tributes
twenty years ago when
bouquets
sprawled one on top of the other
like broken- necked birds.
This
wasn’t the sea.
The sea was sapphire
and spangled
below the Fayed’s
cliff-top estate,
rocked the press men’s little boats
as Diana appeared in a
leopard-print
swim-suit, dived from
the high board
in a perfect golden arrow.
The sea was a wide warm dance floor
where the Jonikal
waltzed, sailed Dodi
and Diana from the hub of St. Tropez.
They
relaxed on deck, compared
favourite movies, lonely childhoods,
made love to the cradling of the waves.
Innocent Victims -- Bill Mitchell
In 2005 the Anglo-Egtptian billionaire Mohammed Al Fayed unveiled a statue of his son Dodi and Dodi's lover princess Diana, placed on the ground floor of his Harrod's Department Store in London. They are portrayed dancing on a beach, below an albatross. Dodi (Emad El-Din Mohamed Abdel Mena'em Fayed) and Diana Spencer, princess of Wales, formerly the wife of prince Charles from 29 July 1981 until 28 August 1996, became romantically involved in July 1997. They died in a car crash in Paris on 31 August, 9 days after they had spent a much-publicized holiday together in the French and Italian Rivieras aboard his yacht, the "Jonikal." Fayed had bought the boat to entertain her and he sold it in 2014, after renaming it the "Sokar' (the Egyptian falcon god) and sold in 2014. Sokar ("hurry to me") was part of the Ptah-Seker-Osiris composite; Ptah was the creator god, and Osiris was the god of the dead. The part of the underworld associated with Sokar was Imhet ("filled up"), noted for its difficult terrain. His followers wore strings of onions around their necks at his festivals, since onion skins were put on the eyes and inside the ear of the deceased during the embalming process to mask the smell.
ReplyDeleteAfter her divorce Diana was deprived of the designation H.R.H. (Her Royal Highness) at Charles' insistence but retained her residence and office in Kensington palace. Upon her death over 1 million bouquets were placed at the Kensington gates, and her coffin spent its last night in London there before being taken to Althorp Park, her family's ancestral home in Northamptonshire.
The albatross belongs to the order Procellariiformes, from the Latin "procella" (a violent wind, a storm)" and the family Diomedeidae, a reference to the former companions of king Diomedes of Argos who were turned into birds (according to Publius Vergilius Maro in the "Aeneid.") The albatross was believed to be the soul of a drowned sailor, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") popularized the notion of that bird as a metaphorical burden.