From the Mythic Delirium Books archives
The Theatre Golems
Dominik Parisien
Photo by AlexanderVanLoon, courtesy WikiMedia Commons
During the Dionysia
By festival’s end we have died as fools, loved as gods, raged as beings in-between, wed tragic to comic and sung and spoken for the year’s competing playwrights. By then, the winners are made known and we who embodied their fictions are vilified: We are told how we are less than golems for they are made of mud and silent service, whereas we are made of stone, made to speak words not our own; that we have no purpose outside theatre, for good servants are best weak and silent. We are told this as the playwrights crush rotten figs on our sand-smoothed faces, grapes, olives, to remind all how the honours are theirs alone, how we are only tools that obey, the amphitheatre’s animated pillars. We are told this as the playwrights take from us our words (the words were always theirs, they claim), return our features to the anonymity of polished stone, to silence, and relegate us to the role of scenery. And, yet, we bear our fates well knowing we have seen the salt-sweat of awe, the heart in every eye as those playwrights never will.
“The Theatre Golems ” first appeared in Mythic Delirium, Issue 28, Winter/Spring 2013.
“The Theatre Golems” copyright © 2013 by Dominik Parisien. This poem may not be reproduced in any form without the author’s express written permission.
