This is another vintage piece. I wrote it nearly 30 years ago while attending a conference in Dordt IA as a member of a small Christian theater group. I served as the stage manager, or, person who managed to get the rest on to the stage.

I was in one of the intro introspective frames of mind. But then, if you read all the way to the end, that will be clear.

"In Search Of Elizabeth"

My body is a house of brick
And wood and I am
Brick and wood,
Flammable and hardly penetrable.
I know better what I am not
Than what I am, for that is what
I have been told more often and
With greater success and recall.

I have come (that was yesterday) and
Tomorrow I shall go. Have I learned
Or did I know already?

Free body/senses? No! Impossible! UnChristian!
As is jealousy. Imagination? Ambition?
No! Not Jesus. Compassion, yes.
Sensitivity, yes. Free? No! Yet,
If not free, then insensitive and insensible.

Back through torturous circuitous routes
To the silent solemn craft, solitary
Votary of pen, thought, word,
Devotee of that which is,
Of he who is all's source and sustenance.

Back to solitude,
The woman's mind behind the child's face,
Graceless, voiceless,
A mime not a truth,
An empty vulgar common mirror
Having glass and frame and no separate self
From those who look at/into it.

A shell in which the sea is heard
Yet neither is nor holds the sea,
Just its sound, just its memory.

The prisoner is the prison now,
And both at last at least are one.

Free is wrong, free is crass,
Singular or en mass.

The writer has written.
The actor has spoken the lines.
If I am not me, then who am I and who
Has taken hand to pen again?

THE END