… was inspired by two objects: firstly a SPINET (Museum no. 19-1887) which almost certainly belonged to Elizabeth I and which bears the royal coat of arms and the falcon holding a sceptre, the private emblem of her mother, Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth is reported to have played 'excellently well … when she was solitary, to shun melancholy'.

The second object chosen is a HANGING (Museum no. T.33GG-1955) with applied panels of embroidery which was probably made by Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury and members of her household at Sheffield Castle where Mary was imprisoned. Mary's emblem of the marigold turning towards the sun (in lower right of the panel) has been combined with various coats of arms and emblems representing courage in adversity.

Mary's Elephant, Elizabeth's Spinet

Some night in the 1580s, she snaps the last knot off with her teeth
By candle-light. One blob under the tail and she has him, in tent
Stitch: startled king from Icones Animalium, a beast she's never seen.
Ears, silver-pink abalone. Feet lost in a webbed pool
Of bubbles: blue muttonfat peas. She rests him on her lap
Writing letters in her head - unsendable as words for resin
In Armenian akrolect. Her cousin knows everything she has to say
Already. It's been said. Outside, the black unbroken forest
Rides to London. Wolves kill a roe, for cubs whose last descendent
Will be shot in Mary's realm, two hundred years down the line.
But she, in these walls, is marigold: a heliotrope,
Turning to sun that'll never warm her skin again,
Ransacking old books in Spanish for emblems of hope.

Down south, the keyboard's come from Florian, in Venice.
Cousin E tries some Byrdian version of Only the Lonely, checks
The gilt inlay, Islamic painted whorls, the logo of falcon and sceptre.
(Her mum's. She paid extra for that.) This sound-hole; a fretted
Bronze rose, is an eavesdropping sun. She's awaiting her spies.
She can never give in. She has become her own grotesque:
She sends men to the tropics, men to death. When her blood says
Dance, she will gavotte the night away with the Earl of Leicester.
Are there tears at what she looks like now, for who on earth else
May show up in her bed? When melancholy strikes, they see
Her turn to a Pavane. Shadow-bones, capitate, triquetral, lunate,
Stripe and flinch in the back of her hand. One frizzed hair,
White and red, drifts down over black middle C.

And if you and I held hands across this room, touched DNA
Of their touch, sloughed off on this tusker
Embroidered in velvet and lint, this Venice lacquer,
Cypress, ebony, we would join fingerprints that never met.