Bruce Bennett

 

The True Story of Snow White

Almost before the princess had grown cold
Upon the floor beside the bitten fruit,
The Queen gave orders to her men to shoot
The dwarfs, and thereby clinched her iron hold
Upon the state. Her mirror learned to lie,
And no one dared speak ill of her for fear

She might through her devices overhear.
So, in this manner, many years passed by,
And now today not even children weep
When someone whispers how, for her beauty's sake,
A child was harried once into a grove,
And doomed, because her heart was full of love,
To lie forever in unlovely sleep
Which not a prince on earth has power to break.

 

Bruce Bennett, "The True Story of Snow White," in Jim Elledge and Susan Swartwout, eds., Real Things: An Anthology of Popular Culture in American Poetry (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999), 95.