I will be secret. I will keep what you want hidden,
Tucked away in a spot no one has ever found.
I will wrap it up, box it, bury it, fold it into a blanket –
Whatever you require.
Author: erainbowd
No, you will reveal it.
Beneath this cloak is a small tender thing.
It is soft and uncertain, precious
Like someone’s first born baby. It grows in swaddled darkness.
It’s not a secret so much as a vulnerability,
A tenderness that might shrink in the light.
If you knew it was there, you might lift the cloak,
Unwrap the blankets, you might reveal it before its time.
I’m waiting for it to open its eyes so it can greet the world
When it’s ready. When it’s grown.
Good my lord, tell it.
That one about the ghost and the murder?
That’s a good one. Last time, at the campfire,
Billy peed his pants he was so scared.
Tell it. Tell the one about the ghostly king
Come to haunt his people, wearing armor and his beaver up.
Tell about how he’s doomed to walk the earth
How he spends his days engulfed in purifying flames
Tell the one about revenge and avenging
Tell the one about betrayals and reprisals
Use those words you have
The ones that make us rapt, the ones we can taste
As you say them.
O, wonderful!
Celia says this, too, but she keeps going to make it
Most wonderful and yet again wonderful.
It must have, at one time, been a sincere exclamation.
Now, we see “O, wonderful” and assume it’s sarcastic
Particularly in the mouths of teenagers. “O, great”
Could go this way too, if we’re not careful.
But then, if I punctuate it: O! Wonderful!
I somehow get the wonder back.
Wondering being something so full, so basic, it feels
Like a gift to remember what it’s like to wonder.
There are few things that spark true wonder
After a certain age. One of the great gifts of children
Is the tremendous surprise that everything in the world is –
A field, a truck, a horse, a constellation, a bone,
A library, a train, a sticker, an eggbeater.
What news, my lord?
News are the things that are new
It’s a plural new.
When we have newspapers, they are recounting of that which is new.
Until this moment, I never thought of where
We get news. News is a product
Something on paper, or in a TV broadcast
Spoken by a serious man in a suit.
When we say it in conversation, to ask for someone’s news
Is to formalize the report a little. It’s like asking for
An update (which is a news report.)
But “what news?” is not far from “What’s new?”
They are, in essence, the same idea –
A check in about what has changed since the last time we connected.
I have discovered , though, that asking what’s new is
A peculiarly American greeting
That America is obsessed with newness –
We name our cities New.
We like products new
We like constantly changing
Ever new horizons
Leaving behind old ideas
Old traditions
Old ways, lines and structures.
How is’t, my noble lord?
How’s it shakin’, bacon?
What up?
You chillin?
Sometimes in intense un-normal situations,
The return to normalcy can be bracing.
Tony told a story about walking through Hackney
Where he saw this guy he knew from his neighborhood –
Someone he greeted pretty regularly, who knew his kids and such.
So this guy he knew from around the way
Was standing on the street
Brandishing Molotov cocktails
Surrounded by a crowd that was scared and confused
Probably, too, police or security, trying to talk him out of it.
It’s a heightened situation
And as Tony goes by he nods at this guy, like always
Says his standard hello and the guy nods
At Tony, lets his weapons drop for a moment
In order to say hi to Tony and his kid
Then once they’ve passed, picks his weapons back up
And once again menaces the crowd.
Tony doesn’t know what happened then –
He kept moving
But I wonder if that little dose of routine
That little break into normalcy
Got the brandishing, violently inclined man
To reconsider what he was doing,
To suddenly see the weapons in his hands –
To be as he was, at least for a moment.
Come, bird, come.
Marcellus as a bird – a nighthawk or an owl.
He flies to the parapets at night
Settling by the arrow slits in the walls
Keenly watching the coming and goings
His eyes following in smooth lines, not missing
The slightest variation in the patterns of the night.
He flies to Hamlet. He flies away.
Then after bringing Hamlet and ghost together
He flies away for good.
Hillo, ho, ho, boy!
Interesting. Interesting.
He’s added an H from the former call and changed
“My lord” to “Boy.”
Is it like when people call a dog?
Like, “Come Boy come. Come on – Give me the bone. Good boy.”
I’ve never heard a bird called Boy
But I sort of would like to.
“Come on Boy, chirp. Peck that seed, Boy. You can do it.
Come on Boy, hop on that perch, Boy. Flap those wings, Boy.”
Illo, ho, ho, my lord!
This is a falconer’s cry, isn’t it?
Once again, I’m struck by the intimacy
That Marcellus has with Hamlet.
Is it standard practice to call a prince
With a falconer’s cry? I’m guessing no.
The prince returns it, in kind, and calls Marcellus a bird.
There must be a kind of tether between them,
Some binding, like the leather that ties a falcon
To an arm, but loose like the faith that when the bird flies away
It will return with the binding of your voice.
The falconer sets free his bird
Secure in the knowledge that it will return
When he calls for it.
The other bird I think of is
In Romeo and Juliet when Juliet imagines Romeo were her bird
Just when she has to let him go.
So be it!
What is Hamlet doing between “I have sworn’t” and now?
Has he been performing some swearing ritual?
So be it sounds like the conclusion of a prayer
Or an oath
Or proclamation.
Has he been on his knees these last three lines,
Drawing diagrams in the dirt
Spitting into his palms, rubbing them with dirt
To stick his oath together with earth?
Maybe, though, he’s just standing there collecting himself
Gearing himself up for his first human contact post ghost.
The Hamlet Project 