Strike

 For the director, cast and crew of Romeo and Juliet, performed  at Northwestern College, May,

                         I    

Strike the set, tear it down, reverse
the Makita drills, ease the deck screws out,
carry the world we made to the dumpster,
hang precarious on ladders, lower on ropes
the black cylinders, full an hour ago
of night and day and myriad moods, coil
the cords and store them deep in the vault
of next month’s illusion, roll up the cyclorama
that made forever from a canvas curve.
This is our last act of dedication to shadow
and light and things as they might be.

                                    II
An hour ago we spun a spider’s web.
With rail and stile we made a world, sliced
a gobo up to cast a mottled light
and thickened feeling to the point of love.
All sightlines accounted for, all structure
hid, we cut and stitched reality
to make a dream. Offstage, actors paced
the greenroom, muttering their lines.
Hirelings to memory, they gave
their voices and their time to make
incarnate some playwright’s studied dream.

While our set stood, we were on strike,
on strike from all that holds the world
prisoner--from carelessness, limp lines,
unrevealing silences and ceaseless talk
that strangles silences into which some meaning
might have flowed, from unread gestures,
incoherent lives, pain unredeemed, love
so long unspoken it becomes unfelt--all that
we put aside and for two hours we lived
inside a mind and spoke no careless
words. We wrought a vision given in love
and gave it free and clear
to those who waited in the dark.


III

And now strike out, lock the doors, leaving
everything in silence, that peculiar
emptiness of space that has not second
use. Step out into the night and walk
an hour beneath the too familiar stars,
spun now by lateness into unfamiliar
shapes. What lines shall we speak now
given back our clueless lives, with half-
forgotten lines, half-written by our DNA?
We try to write the other half and fail
The stars imply a script but written
in a language we don’t know yet, and don’t
seem pure enough to learn. Devotion
wrapped in craft and art can never make
us pure enough, but it is all we have.