Davidson Garrett
An Opera Within An Opera: 1986
Richard & I planned for a year
to attend Joan Sutherland’s
25th Anniversary Gala
at The Metropolitan Opera.
I snagged a couple of hot tickets
& like flighty opera queens
we were giddy as children
about hearing our great Diva
dazzle with vocal fireworks
in Vincenzo Bellini’s I Puritani.
Unfortunately, when the night
arrived, my classical music pal
was hooked-up like an astronaut
wearing an oxygen mask & tubes
connected to an emaciated body
suffering the last stages of AIDS.
Visiting his bleak hospital room
on the performance afternoon,
he insisted I go to the Met alone.
Reluctantly, I left for Lincoln Center
bittersweet without his presence.
After curtain calls, around midnight,
I dashed back to Harlem Hospital
sneaking into a darkened ward
as he languished in a custodial bed.
Surprisingly, I found him wide awake
as I was breathless with enthusiasm
describing how La Stupenda
nailed the blazing coloratura.
Despite his labored breathing,
he smiled—grasping my hand
joyful at the soprano’s triumph.
Weeks later, he gracefully died
& I wrote to Miss Sutherland
relating how her cassette tapes
comforted Richard in his last days.
Answering with a hand-written
letter, she expressed her wish
for a cure for the dreaded disease.
A cherished keepsake, framed
to remind me of the fortitude
& courage my dear friend displayed
during his own operatic death scene.
Davidson Garrett is the author of the poetry collection King Lear of the Taxi: Musings of a New York City Actor/Taxi Driver (Advent Purple Press, 2006) and the chapbook What Happened To The Man Who Taught Me Beowulf? and Other Poems (Advent Purple Press, 2017). A taxi driver for the past 40 years, Garrett is a graduate of The City College of New York and a member of SAG/Aftra and Actors Equity.
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Here is today’s prompt
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Write a narrative poem addressing any aspect of HIV. Not how today’s poem uses mostly prose rhythms and does not use poetic devices like rhyme, meter, refrains, anaphora, apostrophe, stanzas, or formal structures like the sonnet, triolet, villanelle, or sestina. Today’s poem does use lineation—that is, line breaks. You may want to try drafts of your narrative poem with line breaks or without. If you do not use line breaks, you are writing a prose poem…which is a nice thing to try out.