The Elizabethan Actress

you walk across the rice paper world
careful tracks leading back to love's
pressed hard one time that now fade
to old trails and short bleeding cuts,

you are a place of crowds collected
by the balance of a smile's auditioning
a writers player directing her fingers
to the pen of bones & the ink of skins,

you are a wishing well of souls
granting freely stories be pulled
out to telling beneath blond ropes
behind the drops of almond eyes,

you are not acting ever my friend
but are more the grammar of the real
spoken within the souls parenthesis
a careful dialogue forgotten by heart,

you are under studied by kind men
deserving better lines and finer scenes
loving the talent of your friendship
a troop of one I bow to where you lead.

John G.Hall(C)2005

*for Lucia Cox/Actress at The Royal Exchange Theatre.