Opening Night

Opening Night

(“And the men, in great awe of the Lord, offered a sacrifice to the Lord and made vows.” Jonah 1:16)

Unsuspecting of anything sacred among us, we set our course
as if we have rehearsed each unmet morning promised by evening. Only
upon when tossed like eggs for an omelet upon surges higher than our
expectations
do we look in the holds and find our hopes have been sleeping wingless
upon our customary passage.

We play the causes like actors trading ad-libs, making up line upon line
from goodwill to malevolent behind the transom, behind the curtain,
and wait for the applause to validate our one-line wit with which
to wrap up the world.

They keep telling us the music is in the rests, and the magic is
in the pauses, the drama in the unspoken moments when breath
sits like haze upon the frog-pond; but we are quick to the trigger,
uneasy with a world enriched by our erased dialogues.

By now opening night should have passed, the clapping, the laughter,
the happy timing we were after, finished and set before the chosen few
like a child’s drawing on the fridge. But too few knew what it took
to finish (starting so brilliantly) a study in hard work and cake frosting.

Rest and depressed, sometimes we are left with only the pages
of the script
left in our hands. No one to read all the lines, 6 actors reading 9.

Stepping foot now, I hope the silence means sacred, and even the
exhaust fumes from the highway behind me, remind me, holy. The
script reads the same today.