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.)