The Actors’ Art

A Year of Sonnets — 053/365

Photo by Richie Lugo on Unsplash

After Dame Helen Mirren

We raise our eyes from whispers to the light
that rests, a coronet, upon our heads
and cling to every moment, a delight
as our now-practiced feet discover treads
that we have cut into this solemn stage,
a memory now stained into our skin,
voices we lift incarnate from the page
and host ourselves: We carry them within
our beating hearts; they circulate a time
wherein we bear the passions that they play
and sing their songs, deliver every rhyme
to satisfy a public, locked away
until we break the circle and release
our bones alone: the stories never cease.