life. a divine comedy.

Posted on MaggieRuch.com DECEMBER 18, 2014, Original Publish date: Feb 21, 2014

Look at us
We are dancing here
Marionettes on a string
Parading for children
As they giggle and play
Our wooden faces
Painted on two sides
Hollow heads
Cotton-tufted bodies

We dance
The cosmic dance
That has been choreographed
By our Mothers
And Fathers
And by US
A Grand
Grand Design
For our amusement
Since the time that was before time.

Look at me!
My strings move swiftly and I have some skill!
Look at me!
I am covered in glass
Glistening in the sun.
Look at me!
I am in tatters.

We play out our parts as we chose them
Carefully stepping into our puppet-skins
We enter the tiny wooden box-stage and
The puppeteer speaks the words of life over our strings.
Whirring and whizzing we bustle through the performance
All on queue according to our roles
And painted on faces
And stitched on glass beads
Glisten in the sunlight
As children cheer on.

And some days the strings intertwine
And cursing from behind the tiny box-stage
The puppeteer and his assistant
Emerge
White sleeved
White faced
To untangle us.
We lie there
Limp
Waiting
For our spaghetti string predicament to be unraveled.

A marionette’s life is simple
A divine comedy
We dance
We play our part
We never wonder if we have done a good job
The puppeteer takes care of that for us.
We never worry if the crowds will like us or not
We can’t change that anyway
We never think about what we will do tomorrow or in the next act
Because we are just the dancers
Marionettes on a string
Wooden faces
Painted on two sides
Hollow heads
Cotton-tufted bodies
It doesn’t matter to us anyway
We have strings
Yet we are unattached.

Human puppets dance
As if they have strings
As if they have more than two faces
Painted all over their faces
Expressions changeable
Moveable
Forgetting their heads are not hollow
Choosing to slumber and act on auto pilot
Stuffing their bodies with cotton-tufting
And more
And some have fancy moves
And some have a lot of glittery glass
Some like fancy clothes
Some don’t mind tatters
Some are unattached
But they all get entangled

Because they are all really connected
And they are all really the same anyway
They just forget
And when they entangle,
There can be some shouting
Or love
Or joy
Or “happy bumping into you here!”

WE are the puppets.
Who are YOU?

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