10.Theatre Piece by DuncanMcGibbon (world of reading TXT) 📖

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Better to remember we never met, my friend,
Your words and mine are what we live for
each saves a freshness that curiosity would end.
I know I knew your words and sowed their core.

Tableau Vivant: Fete de L’Assomption

The children sit in the church aisles
as deaf to La Liturgie Francaise
as they are to home English.
The Assumption requires us
to go twice in one week.
The sun shines outside
and my daughter has made
its cobblestones
her distant sanctuary.

Soliloquy 13

Driving through Roussillon,
after the gaudy autoroutes hoarding,
petrol pumps, junk food and rubbish
ventes divers and mega-marchées.
to be one with the reddened terrain,
an alluvium of soil from broken schists
the rose-red ancient fire of metamorphic Europe.
The rows of vines are bunched around their fruit
while giant grasses and imported cacti
dance surreally upon the huts where
a people, grown wild, have hidden
in terraces of land cut through by torrents
that witness winter floods.
The roads split from city to town,
from town to canton, from canton
to our village and the unblessed, narrow house
where Bishops tithed in comfort.
I unpack frozen hearts
from the Cabestany Mammouth.


SHOWTIME


Love –Mime 5

Last night the house was left in a mess.
You would say it was me of course.
and I would have agreed had it been less
of a sweltering day, or less hoarse
my voice and my marking less thick.
You left a metaphor, I would say
for our lives to which we stick,
filled with the clutter of the day.
for our lumber is our very self.
not a symbol for some argument.
that sits upon an upper shelf.
Why insist on thanks! Metaphor’s not meant
to be reshelved so neatly with the Delph.


Soliloquy 14

“You must take the train to Valvins again.
only this time, go alone; you cannot afford
any other way. Do not go by sleight, when
before you were a student among the Sorbinnistes,
a clever gang who lived on Ingarden and licensed theft
That was not sixty eight, pas encore la haine Parisienne.

Barrowmen looked the other way then,
as the élite slummed to the trust
of confident, future power.
There is no place to turn in a fossil seam
no matter how formal your existence.
You are inactivity itself.
Memory blurs the power of wholeness.
Have you still the sharpness of a fraud
that gave you simple hope?

Now you must walk my embankment at night.
The gate is where the ivy grows over
the gun acanthus capitals
on the old railway station.
Dogs will bark from the suburbs.
Lights with chalk-yellow flares
will quickly pinpoint each landmark
of your journey, giving it a senseless danger
To get out of the city you must make
it longer. Invite angry looks.
You’re trouble, out to wreck stable assets.

Where Freycinet’s steel leaves the scrub
you are on your own among
sycamores, holly bushes, oaks and pines.
You must go where the river bends and twines
cross the old stone bridge before
the Fifth and Seventh Panzers destroy it,
or trust the temporary one that took
Patton’s supplies on to Bastogne.
Even in December scramble down the bank,
soft with cold mud, the smell of rich earth, grass, nettles
and take to the riverside
to two thin pillars and the narrow brick gateway
with its plain white capitals,
the wrought iron gate,
the simple yard
heaped with last autumn’s leaves,
while across the river the forest drifts green.
On one side my study à la japonais
and next door the Café des Rosiers
where my daughter, Geneviève
danced as Columbine, See her at the gateway,
Hérodiade, serious, mince,
with her dark dress and umbrella.
She joined me in Paris. It was influenza took her.
I stand in Sicily not far from where I once stood
with Monet and Satie.
Now understand ,new songs are made of awe,
remembered injustice
and the rescue of the doomed.”


Chorus 5, School Production

Want to watch our number?
Sir, why don’t you stay?
I start with a kind of rumba
while the others move away.

Then we lie down flat
and do a reggae turn
to “why this and why that?”
then leap and return.

When we come apart,
Michelle does her act
‘cos she’s very smart,
while we’re back to backed.

Don’ yer think it’s worth a try?
the “why this and why that?”
Then we do a little cry
at “why this and why that?”

’Cos no-one wants to tell us
why this and why that.
Its really very serious,
what it’s getting at.

Soliloquy 15


The darkness can be a better fit
for the eye, relaxing into a pitch
away from the weariness of light.
As a body floats unsurely in water
though free of its weight,
so night fires a reflex of fear
back to the mind, despite that soothing
dark that fills our ambience.
Sight haunts its lost weight
though free of perception.

In St Genlis once we stepped into
the primal cave of a Romanesque church
This was midday, under a pointed sun,
and yet we blundered into total dark
in a nether place, out of which loomed
a waxwork 'mistris' of the suffering virgin,
or Christ laid in a glasswork tomb would arise
frightening my daughter to the door.
I brought my feet to the tiny vestry
where a single window elicited a light,
simply to define a darkness,
as disappointment reveals unknown
desire, unheard of aims, yet soon
without the light, my eyes
became acclimatised to the inner gloom
and gradually I learned to forget
the disguise of my own darkness
turning our backs on meagre openings
work routes, habitualfailings, exhaustions
and uncanny limitations that hold us back
from seeing light upon seeing dark.

Tableau Vivant: Our Lady’s Birthday

My children leave for school,
carrying Summer trophies.
Showtime, not memory’s the rule
not wine’s geography,
but cliché’d cares we note
that as aprents we dote.


Soliloquy 16

Perhaps you’ve seen them, the scruffy churches
with unlit porches which assume you’re a thief,
repentant, or not, as you waft past the money boxes.
Pamphlets, dog-eared hymnbooks, newsletters,
almsgivings and minutes of strange groups,
that make you back off and get out to the street.
Here, all journeys seem to end, the steadied breath,
the tie adjusted and the wait. We can only travel
once, for once arrived, a trip repeated
becomes routine, a sand glass of reached distances.
Some only come for weddings, baptisms and funerals
to think high thoughts opportunely, shake hands,
remember names and catch the next train home.
Those who stay have a misfit look about them.
Some stay to remember parents, wives or husbands
or the strange grief of unexpected deaths.
Some on their own might push further in
and open heavy doors, half wanting them locked
and might go in to remember themselves.
Each visit is a stop-over in an awkward place.
Minutes so carefully saved curl and wither
in the dull waste of beeswax and smoke.
We pray for a purpose and think it unanswered
or pray on purpose for an answer unheard.
and as a silence grows, shift shoes as if
to find a depth or shift away from thought at all.


Chorus 6, Final, of Literary Agents

What would you do if in a derelict house he picked out,
painstakingly, a stupid waltz by Strauss on the piano ?
What are you doing anyway listening to this ? Haven't you got something else to do ? What would you do if in a deserted city he relayed a tape of some touching climax in Sibelius or Bruckner, so slowly the sound might seem to fester.
What are you doing anyway listening to this? Haven't you found somewhere else to live? What would you do if from an empty planet he broadcast a pub song so fast its falsetto pitch drove the last amateur footy to their death in a friendly?
What are you doing anyway, listening to this? Haven't you found some other life to live? What would you do if in a shot universe, he sent a radio wave of soapsud jingles into deepest space? What are you doing anyway, listening to this,?

My prayers are more crazy than any of these antics. Haven't you found someone else to sing your songs?

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Publication Date: 11-14-2010

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