 |
| Balcony in Ruins - Old BHS - Brookfield |
Photo Courtesy
Sara C. Mosley,
Brookfield, Missouri
Theater for the Dead
James Hart
Abandoned High
School Building ,
Brookfield , Missouri
Auditorium,
BHS-Landscapes by Kent Durk
After
the couples promenade the desolate halls,
generations
blended without order or meaning,
all
the flappers and the flamers parade beside
the
bobby-soxers clinging to boys in letter jackets
heavy
with medals pinned to their Brookfield B’s,
the
stoners and loners, the losers desperate for dates,
all
of us peering and nodding in nameless recognition
before
last call for seats spared time’s chaos and decay.
Each
night the alumni of loneliness assemble here
to
relive the plots of forgotten plays scattered among
un-numbered
opening nights. We wait for the curtain
that
fell in shreds to shroud a ghostly world below us
to
whisper open in our memories, the clatter and rattle
of
ropes and pulleys in the track reminiscent of bones
or
dice. Life played out games we can’t recall a score.
Stage
lights gone out long ago, a thousand sets arrayed
in
time’s exposures, we peer into layers of liquid light,
moon
and star shimmer come down through empty
windows
glimmering with dust and desolation,
the
crush of glass a script of syllables on the floor,
to
see the players we remember among ourselves.
We
listen for our silent soliloquies about space
and
solitude, recalling only the purr of galaxies,
novas
that brought us here a million dawns ago.
August
29, 2010; February 2, 2013
Any of Kent Durk's photos of the auditorium
would illustrate this poem. Open the following link,
and slides numbered 26-32 feature the auditorium.
Slide No. 30 is the best setting for the poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment