Snow White Puts the Pieces Together

Poem by Jacqueline West

Years later, inheritor of the whole estate, 

she comes back on foot, alone. 

The lands are abandoned, fields a riot

of ragweed, cottages hollow as cracked eggshells. 

After crossing the rotting planks 

to the gate, she stops to breathe deep,

to remember this view of the sky, cut off 

and framed by these high stone walls. And then,

with firm feet, she steps inside. 

She’s a queen herself now, not the infant

lost without the haven of her mother,

the small girl who searched every one of these rooms,

sure that voice, those soft hands, 

waited for her somewhere. She doesn’t visit

the chamber where she was shut away 

in the rush of loss, the hurried remarriage,

the lonely childhood that followed. 

She could just close her eyes to be locked inside.

Instead she strides down to the forbidden place,

to the secrets that are hers now, the doors 

that aren’t bolted anymore. She parts them 

with the toe of a fine leather boot. Here, 

untouched for years, are the bottles blanketed 

by dust, the empty cauldron on the hearth, 

the cobweb- and moss-tapestried bed. It’s all smaller 

and sadder than she had pictured: a poisonous spider, 

dead and dried, shriveled to the size of a parsley seed.

She crosses the clammy floor to the spot

where the broken glass still lies. Each shard

casts back her own face—a face loved by strangers 

when it was dirty and afraid, a face kissed by a prince,

asleep and awake. The face her children reach up 

to touch with their small and silk-soft fingers. She slides

the shards together, edge to edge. Even when she’s done,

she sees herself in pieces, each fragment a gift 

she could hold out on her palm, the way someone else 

might hold an apple, nothing hidden inside but her own living heart.