Watching Midnight Express After John Hurt's Death Poem by Robert Rorabeck

This the residential neighborhood
I think you remember-
You grew up here, child of woman and of man-
But while you have slept,
the nocturnal animals are reclaiming their
playgrounds-
Where you used to sleep, growing up
as a boy,
was once their cannibalistic fairgrounds-
Terrapins and jaguars,
spotted, lethargically,
hunting for orchids and hares as in the
fields converted shadows made
love to your cousins:

The roses you once tried to give to her
are buried here-
the skeletons made to rest here
are re animated during the work week
while your mother and father have driven away
to their reconciled plots:

And I am left at home watching movies
that I was once too immature for-
Watching Midnight Express after John Hurt's death-
The storylines of puppets you used to master for
me while I slept,

And the airplane spread their wings.
They are leaping to kiss the volcanoes,
as the girls that work on them have learned to fly
to and from their places of work and of lovers:

In fact, all of the actors in the show are
changing forms- women fleeing the staged shadows
of feral kings,
recruiting the metamorphosis of wild birds
that struggle to rise from the stony pits,
the haunted suburbia of our once shared childhoods-
Now these graveyards.