Dying A Death
Cupped in the stone hands
of Epidaurus,
a spectator-Hydra breathes
in unison, mountains
lean on a bruised sky,
Artemis’s translucent orb
silhouettes actors gliding forward.
Now King Creon commands:
Enclose her in that vaulted grave!
Antigone groans: That word
hath come near to death!
A third voice calls for a doctor.
Houselights wake us
from a dream of sisters
and dead brothers –
enter the heart-attack victim.
Audience stirs uneasily
at life’s intrusion,
desert sand in a whisper of wind.
Creon removes his crown,
a demi-god,
become human,
to comfort the suffering.
But the sick spectator,
unable to walk theatre’s tightrope,
balancing success and disaster,
bows out
in tragic silence,
before fifteen thousand faces,
no applause for his final exit.
Heracles’s creature sighs,
Creon resumes his crown,
that regal voice
again closes the gap
between an actor’s pretence
and our disbelief,
theatre and life move on,
hand in hand,
as fiction encloses the real
in a velvet glove.
Page(s) 46
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The