She is squat
Barrel chested
With an extraordinary décolletage:
A voluptuous Elisabetta
Queen of Spain:
Like a small black swan she floats across the stage.
Wide eyed
Her puffy sweet face
Is flecked with meaning.
We sense her breathing.
She stares at the tomb of the undead King
And then
The unbroken arc of sound pours forth
As the iron lungs
Vault suspended disbelief
Into the firmament.
You who knew the vanities of the world
On this volley of reckoning
The young Queen
Remembers the snatches of happiness
That she
A refugee
Pawned by King to King
Now settled as mother and wife
Must bear at the nexus of despair
When state and church demand regal adherence
As the protocol of the protected.
You who knew the vanities of the world
In solace
She etches this dark farewell to hope
To tenderness
To the grace of passion
For a life sealed
In the tomb of remembrance.
Aida lurks in the shadows.
The Black Queen+
With her Mexican Prince*
Now light their own stark fuse:
They summon a preposterous equality
To hymn liberties outmoded ways
Rock firm
Against the tyranny of inertia
The terror of outsourced ways
The restless ache
That haunts our cluttered world
Where heretics are burnt alive
In South Pacific states
No deux ex machina
To salve their torture and demise:
The nation state devours the weak
And blames it on repentance.
The Minister for liberty
Draped in fallow smiles
Sits behind us
With his entourage
Who brushes past
And brusquely jars our heads.
Terror lurks beneath the surface.
The Grand Inquisitor
Invokes the power to commission
And absolve all sins:
Harsh belief and bigotry
Contaminate the wells of time.
Though stilled
The Black Queen flaunts her difference
Stands her sacred ground
And calls upon the memory of forgiveness:
Regina Coeli
Pieta, Pieta.
In that vast ensemble
Where difference is a fleck of colour
Arrayed upon the broadest spectrum
Great shafts of sound vibrate the hall.
The communal survives.
You who knew the vanities of the world
Peasant and Patrician
Compose anew a complex hope
In all its light and darkness:
Pity floods the stage.
+Latonia Moore *Diego Torre - Opera Australia– Joan Sutherland THEATRE – Sydney Opera House (SOH) – August 4, 2015
Gar Jones – August 2015
Barrel chested
With an extraordinary décolletage:
A voluptuous Elisabetta
Queen of Spain:
Like a small black swan she floats across the stage.
Wide eyed
Her puffy sweet face
Is flecked with meaning.
We sense her breathing.
She stares at the tomb of the undead King
And then
The unbroken arc of sound pours forth
As the iron lungs
Vault suspended disbelief
Into the firmament.
You who knew the vanities of the world
On this volley of reckoning
The young Queen
Remembers the snatches of happiness
That she
A refugee
Pawned by King to King
Now settled as mother and wife
Must bear at the nexus of despair
When state and church demand regal adherence
As the protocol of the protected.
You who knew the vanities of the world
In solace
She etches this dark farewell to hope
To tenderness
To the grace of passion
For a life sealed
In the tomb of remembrance.
Aida lurks in the shadows.
The Black Queen+
With her Mexican Prince*
Now light their own stark fuse:
They summon a preposterous equality
To hymn liberties outmoded ways
Rock firm
Against the tyranny of inertia
The terror of outsourced ways
The restless ache
That haunts our cluttered world
Where heretics are burnt alive
In South Pacific states
No deux ex machina
To salve their torture and demise:
The nation state devours the weak
And blames it on repentance.
The Minister for liberty
Draped in fallow smiles
Sits behind us
With his entourage
Who brushes past
And brusquely jars our heads.
Terror lurks beneath the surface.
The Grand Inquisitor
Invokes the power to commission
And absolve all sins:
Harsh belief and bigotry
Contaminate the wells of time.
Though stilled
The Black Queen flaunts her difference
Stands her sacred ground
And calls upon the memory of forgiveness:
Regina Coeli
Pieta, Pieta.
In that vast ensemble
Where difference is a fleck of colour
Arrayed upon the broadest spectrum
Great shafts of sound vibrate the hall.
The communal survives.
You who knew the vanities of the world
Peasant and Patrician
Compose anew a complex hope
In all its light and darkness:
Pity floods the stage.
+Latonia Moore *Diego Torre - Opera Australia– Joan Sutherland THEATRE – Sydney Opera House (SOH) – August 4, 2015
Gar Jones – August 2015