How to Make a King

There is an old fable, it could be true, that tells 

of kings in Medieval Europe who have a leg 

or a hip ritually broken before taking the throne. 

He would forever travel with a stiffening limp, that king,

the slowness and unsteadiness his leg created would 

remind him of the common people, whom he ruled.

An understanding and a knowing pity for those 

who have little grew as roots from his labored 

walking, his cane buttressing him like cathedral walls.

This was his sacrifice. We can say that a crown, 

like a lion, is reserved for someone who has fully

arrived, is incarnate, sanguinely embodied.  

The many years it takes to inhabit graciously such a 

form, suggests that to be an elder of any type, to be regally 

present in this world, means that you never appear 

At your throne without a limp, a broken smile, a marriage 

wasted, a child who’s missing or estranged, or a few 

big things you would have rather not taken for granted.

If this story rings true, then this is how royalty is made:

being removed of something so valuable, we learn to give

over a life, the very things we perceive we have lost.