Six lines, one full stop, and a title that does half the work. An interregnum is the gap between one ruler and the next, when the throne is empty and nobody is quite in charge. Harry Fainlight packs that idea into a single dusk-lit scene. A queen has come and gone, her "brief flaming" has left only "ruined palace walls," and in the space she vacated, peacocks stroll about as though they had inherited the place.
The first line is double-edged. "A queen's brief flaming left" can mean that her blaze of power has departed, or that the flaming left something behind, namely the ruin. With no punctuation until the final word, the grammar wobbles in just this way. "Those ruined palace walls / these peacocks strutting them" has no comma or connecting word to join the two phrases, so the reader has to patch the sentence together, much as you might reconstruct a palace from its stones. The syntax itself seems half-fallen.
"Flaming" is a well-chosen word. Fire is brilliant, brief, and leaves ash. The queen is not said to have reigned or ruled, only to have flamed, which squeezes her glamour, her power, and perhaps her end into one burst of light. The peacocks are a deflating answer. "Strutting" sounds like what it describes, with its puffed-up, bouncing stress, and the birds strut along the walls, claiming the architecture of power with none of its substance. Peacocks are traditional emblems of vanity and display, so they make a fitting mock-court, all plumage and no government. In this interregnum nobody rules, and so the birds pose.
Then the poem swerves. "One calls" is the shortest line, two syllables with white space on either side, and it works like a sudden noise in a quiet courtyard. A peacock's cry is famously harsh, and the poem does not flatter it. The sound is "hideous." The sentence that follows is oddly built: "hideous with what its thousand eyes that cry / in coming night behold." The "thousand eyes" must be the eye-spots of the tail feathers, and the poem lets them "cry" in two senses at once, weeping and shrieking. The bird's dazzling display becomes a lament. The call is hideous "with what" the eyes behold, yet the poem never says what that is. The verb arrives last, held back by the twisted word order, and it lands almost as an instruction to us as well as a description: *behold*. The only thing the poem shows approaching is "coming night," so the reader is left to infer that darkness is the next occupant of the empty throne. Dusk is itself an interregnum, neither day nor night, so the title applies twice, to the ruined court and to the hour.
The sound patterns support this. The poem's only true rhyme links "walls" and "calls," lines two and four, so the single chime in the poem joins what has fallen to the cry that fills the emptiness. The long *i* sounds of "eyes," "cry," and "night" gather in the last lines like a keening note. The line lengths are uneven in a way that seems meaningful, though this is a reading rather than a certainty. Two short lines of about six syllables, a longer one, the two-syllable stab of "One calls," then a sprawling fifth line, and finally a short, closing one. The fifth line opens out as a tail fans, and the last folds it shut.
What makes the poem worth reading is its refusal to explain. It does not moralise about the fall of rulers or say whether the queen deserved her ruin. It sets a fading light, a broken wall, and a splendid bird with an ugly voice side by side and lets the combination work. Beauty and hideousness live in the same creature, and the creature's thousand eyes are fixed on something we are never told. Because the grammar is as fractured as the masonry, the poem makes us feel a lost order rather than just hear about it. In six lines, power becomes a short flare, and what comes after it is a bird and the dark.