WHAT I LEARNED AT THE OPERA by Julie Green

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE OPERA by Julie Green

There is a story carried in music.

The man is dying. Someone always dies in opera.

In his hand he cradles a book, his sorrow

bleeding through the music as a last testament…

I wanted to make something true,

it didn’t have to be great.

He clutches the book to his chest, weeping

that it be simply, good.

You don’t have to be dying of aids to be there.

You don’t have to be a writer to ride

the music into the scene as author, lover,

or the girl who might read it…

someone who is feeling hopeless.

someone you’ll never meet.

You sit in the faceless gathering,

and each one bears a poem, drawing,

an impression, or unrealized thing.

It doesn’t have to be great, this work

for someone you may never know to see

and take it into the parched hollows

of their heart.

The writer grips the book and moves

to the open window…

Maybe, just maybe it will keep her alive long

enough to write a poem for someone else.

The music stills, suspending us there.

We prowl through rooms, the dry cleaners,

a school, an office park. The cost of survival

is to make, and the need seeps into the air.

As he falls from the window, we are the man,

our music simmering along a tender line

that stutters, groping for contact with the hopeless girl.

She is always here in the crowd,

around, and within us.

Julie Green is a retired museum curator, wife, mom, lifelong choral singer, and radical arts advocate. She writes in her living room with her dog Tashi who rarely provides inspiration and sleeps a lot. She is currently finishing a novel and putting together a chapbook. Her work has appeared in several journals including Slant, The Reach of Song, Circle of Women (Emory University), and Naugatuck River Review. She is the 2023 and 2024 recipient of the Herbert Shippey Award for Excellence in Southern Poetry, and the Low Country Award for Short Story given by the Southeastern Writers Association.