Scene 2

 

Mestra lowers her mask.  Her speech is to be punctuated by extremely spare, quiet and irregular percussion (rattling and shaking) throughout the first three stanzas)

 

M:                    A cloud has crossed the face of the sun

                        By night the ice creeps further down the mountainside

                        The wind holds still,

                        Before the gale’s unleashed

                        And the grove lies broken, silent in mournful death.

                        The earth beneath me trembles –

But no, it is only I who quake

At what these malevolent symbols imply:

That darkness will devour my joy.

 

Where is my love?  Where has he gone?

I waited for him to return from the hills,

But only heard

The scraping, grinding sound

Of trunks uprooted, of columns stripped, of nature’s temple desecrated.

By might I dream of his voice,

But only a laughing shadow flickers upon my pillow and is still.

 

I would turn to my father,

But some strange obsession governs him,

Like one possessed,

An evil spirit

Has bent him all out of natural form.

I turned to him for comfort in my grief,

But only found the hungry eyes of a madman

Devouring, devouring, devouring.

Consuming the world around him.

 

End of percussion.

 

                        Is there none to whom I might turn?

My lover gone, my father lost –

Who but the gods

Will hear my cries?

To them shall I turn, to them I’ll call for strength.

 

For so it is when Man by Man’s abandoned

We seek in heaven what we cannot find on earth.

Though flesh shall rot, and Kinships die,

The gods proclaim the Spirit’s worth.

 

(She raises her mask again.)