Whispers in the Hollow Theatre
The Vieille salle lay draped in silence deep;
Its vaulted ribs, once thrumming with a dream,
Now murmured secrets none but ghosts could keep.
Dust coiled in arabesques on crimson rows,
Where velvet cushions bore the weight of time;
And shadows danced where once the footlight glows,
Encasing memory in a sacred rhyme.
Within this tomb of echoes softly chained,
There lingered One—the Artiste, worn and gray,
Whose laureled past, in grandeur once ingrained,
Now flickered faint as twilight’s fading day.
His step was slow, yet carrier of grace,
Eyes glazed with portraits of forgotten cheer;
His presence, like a verse that time erase,
Told tales no living audience could hear.
“Ah, hollow stage,” he breathed, voice cracked yet pure,
“The canvas once where life’s grand pageants played,
Now mourns the silence none may long endure—
The end of acts where mortal dreams did wade.”
He paced, a silhouette ’gainst faded light,
Each footfall conjuring the ghosts before,
The roaring crowds, the spotlights dancing bright,
The fervor of applause, the thunder’s roar.
In mirrors cracked with age, he glimpsed himself—
A visage carved by years that etch and steal;
The youth once draped in passion’s vibrant elf,
Now wrapped in shadows none but he could feel.
A tapestry of past performances
Unfurled within his mind—a spectral scroll:
The lovers’ trysts and kings with heavy crowns,
The tragedies that bled his very soul.
Yet all these phantoms, brilliant once, had fled,
Leaving but silence vast, a yawning plain.
And in this hollow, where the heartstrings bled,
He grappled with his self, his joy, his pain.
“What am I now?” he mused with faltering breath,
“A shadow tethered to a vanished past?
An echo born from life’s inexorable death,
Or something more — enduring, meant to last?”
His hands, once deft in weaving joy or grief,
Lay folded, trembling softly as a leaf;
Yet in their quiver stirred a silent plea,
For meaning in the vast infinity.
Upon the stage, a broken chandelier,
Its crystal tears refracted dim starlight;
A symbol of the grandeur disappearing,
A fractured prism caught ‘twixt dark and bright.
And from the rafters, whispers seemed to fall—
Not spectres, but the traces of epochs gone;
Their voices braided in a spectral thrall,
A melancholy, half-forgotten song.
“Do you remember, when the world applauded?”
Softly they asked, like breeze through tarnished glass.
He nodded, heart by wistful longing braided,
Yet knew such splendour merely could not last.
The stage—the altar of his life’s immense play—
Had held a mirror up to mortal plight:
To smile, to weep, to dance the hours away,
Then fade at close, dissolved into the night.
Artiste paused, his gaze a well of flame,
Searching the darkness for some living spark;
For though forgotten by the hallowed name,
Hope glimmered faintly from the deepest dark.
“Perhaps,” he whispered, “memory’s not just strife,
But a lantern borne through corridors of time;
That guides us thro’ the labyrinth of life,
And illumines moments buried, yet sublime.”
The silence bent around his fragile thought,
As if the theatre itself held breath;
And in those walls, the essence of him caught—
A fragile dance ’twixt melancholy and death.
Then from a corner, faint a spark took flight,
As moonbeams pierced a shuttered window’s gloom;
A silent herald of the coming light,
A promise woven through the night’s perfume.
He stretched his hands to catch the fleeting gleam,
And felt within his breast a quiet stir;
Not death’s cold clasp, nor mere forgotten dream,
But life’s refrain, still singing in the blur.
No curtain calls would stir this empty hall,
No radiant crowds nor thunderous acclaim;
Yet in this desolation, he stood tall—
A man reclaimed beyond forgetting’s game.
For memory, that fickle, weaving thread,
Binds hearts to past in tender, aching ties;
Yet keeps alive the living and the dead,
Within the gaze of ever-watching skies.
And so he waits, where shadow softly lies,
A silent witness to the flux of years;
No grand finale greets his fading eyes,
But whispers folded gently with his tears.
The world outside—a canvas vast and wide—
Awaits the next soliloquy, the next breath;
A story yet to walk the vacant stride,
Emerging slowly from the hushed depths.
For all who dance upon life’s trembling stage,
Must bow before the quiet thrill of time;
And in the ending write another page—
A verse unfinished, bound in art and rhyme.
Thus lingers still the Artiste—aged, wise—
Between the echoes of what was and might be;
His soul a beacon ‘neath forgetful skies,
Embroidered deep in human memory.
And where the Vieille salle breathes her plaintive sigh,
The question pulses—waiting to unfold:
What stories yet shall on these boards comply,
What light from darkness courage will enfold?
