The Audience [by Lera Auerbach]

 

If I were dead, I wouldn’t want to stay around. I would fly to some other realm where I would no longer be myself but everything else at the same time. A happy, joyful radiance of a realm. 

But I wouldn’t be able to jump there if my heart was too heavy with worry for my loved ones who are still living in this world. I would have to stay around to see how they are coping. The living become the responsibility of the dead. Maybe, if I stayed around, I could still help them somehow. 

My dead grandparents and their parents and the parents of their parents und so weiter slightly move their invisible bodies making room for the new arrivals. They watch how I write these lines in English – the language they never spoke and slightly shake their heads.

 

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

"slightly move their invisible bodies/making room for the new arrivals" is uncanny and sad and wondrous. Thank you, Lera Auerbach, for the video and the prose poem. When the lights dim on stage, is that what the performer sees -- invisible angels? Have you ever seen the series of angel photographs by Francesca Woodman? Tapping into the surreal, the numinous.

[Wordle]

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