After Hamlet
©July 27th, 2019
By Vijaya Sundaram
People leave in twos and threes.
The park-lights catch a few stragglers in a huddle.
The green-room tent collapses
Like a souffle with floppy egg whites,
While we remove poles and pegs.
We can unpeg a play,
Unscrew our emotions,
Uncap our realer selves.
But words seep in, sideways –
And osmotically – now Shakespeare
Is entwined with our DNA.
And who’s to say which self is realer?
We are a summation of all we’ve read,
All we’ve said, all we’ve had said to us,
All we’ve dreamed, all we’ve imagined,
All we’ve sung and spoken,
And seen and done.
Is there a core, or are we like
A constantly roiling Earth,
In flux, rising and folding,
Boiling and churning within,
Even as we cool and harden without?
There are always fault-lines,
And trenches, and places into which
We can get pulled, impelled blindly.
When we emerge, we are always more,
And always less.
Too much thinking, this.
Here is what’s real: Humans re-creating
Fiction from four hundred years ago
Playing with words, with stories,
Playing with our capacity for self-deception.
Back. The night is cool, the play is over,
Laughter blooms in one corner,
Someone rolls up cables,
Someone counts the evening’s haul.
We carry what we can to waiting cars.
We fold up things, quietly fold up our Selves,
Voices tucked away into throats,
Ready to restore Dailyness.
For if we didn’t have the Mundane,
How would we detect the Sublime?
We go from one real Self to another,
The night parts the doorway into Dream,
Where another Self awaits, more real than all else.
I go gratefully into the waiting arms
Of Sleep, perchance to dream.
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