We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
~Shakespeare The Tempest
Lear in the windy wilds,
Prospero on his isolated island,
us just after lights out
That moment lights fade
before the curtain rises
and the prologue speaks
We are not alone
but lifted into family stories
noble, extraordinary
In this theatre of peace
animals speak and trees sing—
we warn each other
The boundary into madness
is one mere step away—
to stay we must believe
And walk with the Gods
as if we were immortal
one night, one week a year
Just when we think we’re crazy,
we’re sane. Just when we know
we’re dreaming, we wake.
Inspired by earthweal weekly challenge: BEN BOLCAIN
My blog poems are rough drafts.
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© 2021 Susan L. Chast
Ah, this is a perfect response to the prompt. I love every line, especially the closing ones.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sherry. This poem fits the prompt perfectly. Madness is so often a step away as we come into awareness then when we wake, well - on we go. :) Suzanne - Mapping Uncertainty
ReplyDeleteTo the renaissance mind (perhaps where the last last vestiges of our natural being could be found), nature's order and balance was the root and branch of human sanity. Disrupt that with outrageous fortune and boundless intemperance, the order inverts into calamity. We don't have to travel very far any more to go crazy - its "one mere step away --: modern mind is haunted with madness, so that "when we think we're crazy, / we're sane. Just when we know / we're dreaming, we wake." (Exquisite Susan.) Yet we have never been alone and the "theater of peace" is the sane world we can yet reach, home in the inhuman wild. Bolcain is the "one night, one week of a year" when we forget we live there all the time. Thanks Susan for the deep meditation and the verdant reading it offers.
ReplyDeleteI really feel this - those boundaries between mad and sane, between darkness and light: it's where true poetry resides!
ReplyDeleteI like the theatrical metaphor very much, the notion of dual personality, masks and the shedding of them. The animals live in your theatre of peace all the time, until we shatter it.
ReplyDelete