2010/09/13 Absolution (Rev.) Poem by Margaret Alice

Washing dishes, dainty crystal glasses, lovely red
cooking pots – works of love – listening to
Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus singing bel canto
with the rising notes, my whole being vibrating
harmonics, every fibre reverberating to divine
frequencies – spirit growing stronger

Lesley Garret singing Smoke Gets In Your Eyes and
Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again from Phan-
tom of the Opera, taking me higher still, sweetness
of her voice evoking unfulfilable longing for perfect
beauty, sitting in front of TV with Lloyd Webber’s
Phantom DVD, listening to Emmy Rossum’s

youthful voice interpreting a young girl’s longing
to see her beloved dead father again, the bell-like
clarity balm to my soul, coupling symbolism of The
Phantom’s total absolution of a lost man threatening
her happiness with her fiancé, realising The Phantom
suffered at the unforgiving hand of general society

Filling my little world with grandeur, I am glad the
allergy prevents me ever becoming self-righteous
as the Christian church requires its adherents to be,
I can never judge the Phantom – I identify with pain
and rejection he experienced – given I cannot meet
any set standards no matter how hard I try…