It Was All Good Theater
Pglurp, doosh, pglurp, doosh
Dockside aquamarine water, luminescent in the sun, impossibly split in two.
A fisherperson adjusted her shoe.
Casting her fishing hook, the once displaced woman eyed her beagle, a canine gaily panting.
“It was all good theater, wasn’t it, puppy?”
During those eon months of peacetime’s eclipse, her mind had been ranting.
Out of her friends’ lips came amazement that her mind survived.
Prying the fishing bucket out of the woman’s grasp, making her thoughts sing, was a rare sight:
Hardly seen in all the eight warring months was an eagle leaping wing-by-wing.
She began sighing, relishing another sight once rare:
Now spared cannon fumes, tank discharges, and ravaging skirmishes, a free expanse of pure air.
A war-whipped nation earlier compelled the woman to take flight.
She feverishly dashed with her dog to the train station, her life and her pet’s now vulnerable to blight.
Paces were much scampered as she heard soldiering night-campers.
Her entrails’ emotional jumbles led her to swift stumbles.
Coastal beneath-docked waters gracelessly announced with a pglurp and a doosh the fall of her suitcase against the impending fall of a besieged city no longer looming tall.
When the suitcase fell, a keepsake was lost.
When the suitcase fell, a confidante was tossed.
When the suitcase fell, a guide fell, to her immense cost.
Worn from miles-endless treks, she became.
Worn by obstacles, her body limply tilted, growing lame.
Placing her dog down on the woody path, the woman submitted to plunging into the coast’s night sea, her resolve wilted.
Soon, however, limpness’s desertion, the woman sensed.
Sensories retrieved, the refugee seldom had time to have grieved.
She swooped to her one possession storing all other possessions, harnessing the sea’s liquid uncontained.
Her needfuls she ambitiously snatched from the luggage clasp unlatched.
She was back from her brief refuge place.
She was back at the memorable dock, where she fished, not for trout, but a personal item, from that dreadful drowning night, which she’d not taken out.
Out of her suitcase, on that day, fell socks with her parents’ faces embroidered.
How strange that this survivor declares her ordeal “good theater.”
A few explanations little derived?
One was trauma whose hold she deep disdained.
Two, all the world’s been a stage as Shakespeare emblem wrote.
But staring warfare face-on was, for the woman, a demented plot smack-gloved, contrived.
For her, for her furry beloved, a plot twist did arise.
Not by any puppeteering war tyrant but by her, the “un-victim,” if such a word ever was.
Abroad a puppeteering war tyrant had vented his want for all the bombarded’s demise.
In all the bombardment surprise, the woman should not have outlasted.
Save for her faith and her pup’s warmness eighth, her inner banner high-masted.
A demented plot was assigned to her, no doubt.
Nonetheless, she determined to twist it till, to her own soul, her strength was self-undoubted.
She determined to escape, to let circumstances leave no perpetual scrape.
Shaken as she was, their freedom, both her and her pup’s, remained her cause.
