The Coliseum Collage

The spectators all wear white, the same color
cloaking their head in cloth.
A gladiator,
calm and leather clad,
feeds something tasteless
to a curious,
sniffing
lion
whose appetite
seems never satisfied

Are the spectators on trial?
Is there a trial?

Someone in the audience shouts,
"When do the games begin?"
The spectators,
chattering away
like any patient crowd,
hear,
yet deliberately take little notice.

The hermit,
squatting by a sandstone wall
of an empty walkway,
notices.

"The Emperor starts the games,"
he mutters to himself.

Underneath (where no one can look),
many felt that generations would pass
within these very walls,
and that somehow
the game was already afoot.
Why else were they there,
dressed in their simple yet holiday best?

Some wandered, some waited,
others held optimistic candles
impatiently
to music
they did not understand,
but hoped to like.

At times, a rush of anticipation
would sweep the crowd,
like a warm wind
waving across a ripe field
of golden wheat.
The spectators would sit.
Some would sigh.
The gladiators take positions
that they somehow knew
without rehearsal.

A gleaming chariot bursts through the gates,
on schedule,
kicking up grand dust of who knows who.
The crowd jumps to its feet
cheering loudly
sending startled
civil birds
to flight.

"It's as if the whole world were here,"
beams the charioteer,
smiling broadly,
waving, again
at his peak of glory.

The Sun,
brightly accenting his polished armor,
enhances his magnificence.

Have the games begun?

Unnoticed, the fool,
always ready to miss something,
drops a red petal from his high perch
on the coliseum wall.

It wafts down, like a slow eternity
— which it is —
falling to rest
with a soft, cosmic,
thud
on the Persian rug floor
of a dream,
where the wisdom of the wise,
and the wizard,
and the doubtful
goes unnoticed by all
but the closest at hand.

The soft sound echoes,
like tiny feet
pattering down
the sky-blue
marble
hallway
of infinity:
The music
to which they dance.

And dance they do.
Behind the lyrics of joy and sadness,
of daily expectation,
runs the rhythm of hope
and of ungraspable understanding.

"Will the music ever cease?"
softly mused the hermit
smiling,
nodding, and turning to
climb the ancient stairs.

"It's the song of lovers."

Night came;
the lights of the coliseum
went dark.
Everyone,
gladiators and spectators alike,
slept in place,
in full dress,
awaiting the morning,
while the rhythm continued,
pulsing softly,
incessantly,
reassuringly,
beneath them.

*

Evin O'Ryan