Well, if not “finish” then “bring to a resting place, like a man who needs to catch his breath after a wrestling match”

One pesky issue is voice. It began as a dramatic monologue in Jacob’s telling (“My hip was hurting pretty bad”), segued to the second person and back again (“Angels are over-rated”), and now I’m suddenly struck by the possibility of rendering it entirely from the angel’s point of view.
I could at last solve the ancient mystery of why they fight to a stalemate, for example. I mean, seems like any angel worth his salt, if he wasn’t just pretending to want to overcome his human opponent, would just carry him a couple hundred feet up and drop him. So why all the drama?
I could conveniently reveal God’s intentions without beating around the bush, which would likely mean all the poem’s surprises would have to come from Jacob.

Unfortunately he’s not terribly likable in the first place.

And I’m still dogged by my memory of that Jacob Epstein carving in the Tate…trying to squeeze the learning from it.

Give me a day.

Also yesterday, I submitted five pages of verse, as required, to the North Carolina Poetry Society, which offers a weeklong residency at Weymouth (the Weymouth Center for Arts and Humanities in Southern Pines). I’ve stayed there before a few times while working on plays, and I found those weeks productive and pleasant.

Along with the tedious grant application I gave them a few poems, including “Dinosaurs in the Yard”:

Dinosaurs will come and go if you treat them right.
Mornings, I wake to their boasts:
“Look at me! Look at me now!” chirks the chickadee
while a catbird practices twelve-tone scales.
A cardinal robed like a pope 
(his reach exceeding his grasp)
locates the birdbath: “Bella! Bella!”  
The junco, with her courtesan’s eye,
trills one ironic note like a busted gamba.

Ten thousand throats in a saurian welter
that Plato would love, though your ear 
rewrites their ropy chants in a tongue
repurposed for those born in beds, 
not nests–those apt to die like swans, 

singing. 

I admire New York’s Public Theatre and others for having mounted productions of, say, Julius Caesar with thinly-veiled contemporary references, a brave act that cost them financial support. [Later: James Shapiro writes about this production from an insider’s view and at length in his 2020 book Shakespeare in a Divided America.]

But it took me until 2019 to find my own way, when I wrote my third children’s Christmas pageant for my hometown UU congregation, setting it in two venues: a Bethlehem stable and King Herod’s court. It’s been controversial. First a person of color took offense to some of the language (e.g., “boss-man”), intimating that even in a liberal and justice-seeking denomination there should be no room for politics. Then religious educators got hold of it. After I was forced to delete references to the Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2:16 ff), which children raised on the Brothers Grimm and Fortnight somehow can’t handle, we still had to smooth over any notion that harm might come to Jesus. Wait till Good Friday, I say. Meanwhile, my Herod threatens to put the Wise Men in cages since they’re not from around here.

So no, it’s not easy being real.