It's Still Life

Vanessa Redgrave is Cleopatra with her face white as winter, and her neck exhausted from the weight of thoughts, and she begins from a place of rooted pain, a rattling thunder, and then she speaks —

… his face was as the heavens
and therein stuck a sun and moon
which kept their course
and lighted the earth …

A breeze, perhaps her breath, catches her hair of thinning silver. It casts a critical shadow across her face, her shining moon of frailties. This woman, though which one I am not sure, as one is the other and the other is the one. She walks with crowns and condemns shadows to quiet -— into the size of dreams.

Are we for the dark —
a promise and pleasure,
a puppet for the moon.

Notes: ref to Anthony and Cleopatra by W Shakespeare, Act 5 Scene 2. This haibun is written for dVerse Poets. For details of this writing prompt, visit dVerse. Image is from New Zealand National Library. Flickr Commons Illustration by Kay Nielsen in East of the sun and west of the moon (1914), (198 x 150 mm), Alexander Turnbull Library   © Misky 2020