Friday poem: Chess by Laura Murray

Chess

Sometimes, impatient just to have things happen

I take your pawn, knowing you’ll take mine.

How else will the game develop? We can’t skirt each other

endlessly, and I respect how the game deprives

us both of room. Better to get on with it:

brotherhood doesn’t exist on this board.

Instead, there’s hardship, competition – this medieval

game, a form of early capitalism.

I love the pensive bishops, the tangential rooks.

I love the knights, their horses flailing in battle –

but they keep jumping into the future

where the tanks and the nuclear bombs are:

aggression rises as it does in modern nations.

Even today, we still experience the frail type,

whose power is predominantly symbolic

who can only dodder one space at a time.

And then there is the truly regal one –

who, suddenly, half by chance, finds supremacy –

like the queen moving along a vector

nobody had foreseen, and she transforms our life.

— Laura Murray