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In honor of my most recent theatre experience, now ended with much sighing (in relief, in sorrow, in the bittersweet state of mind when the transience of all things art and all things theatre and all things of life hits you hard) – a poem, written by an alum of my college (not me):

 

Eaves Dropping

 

Flat worlds stacked against the wall turned outside in

Their inhabitants walk this place

And if you listen through the hum of the worklights

You can hear them

As all the playwrights of the world

Whisper and shout their words of love

Through the eaves

Behind the beaten black piano

Hamlet delivers his soliloquy to Hedda

While Ibsen’s Ghosts creep with mine along the catwalk

Where twenty suns will burn tomorrow

And the Diviners remember what almost was

To extras that huddle between

Black legs towering toward the night

(there are stars among the rafters

                     where the ceiling gets lost among the flies)

 

Like Joan of Arc, I listen to the voices

And pray that I may someday give birth

to one of their number.

The walls breathe for me

And the moon roles over in its sleep.

 

Mother, give me a sun . . .