Lights up (or curtains open) on a beard.
It starts to grow.
It grows and grows, long and spindly.

Soon it’s joined by other beards.
They grow into one another
until they are unrecognizable for what they once were.
Somebody in the audience might think:
Wait! What are we looking at again?

A forest.
Enter Hansel and Gretel.
They wander round and round
leaving only a trail of breadcrumbs,
but never finding the candy house.

They starve.

Become skeletons.

Become dust.

The dust scatters,
and yet the breadcrumbs remain.

Enter a little bird (preferably a hummingbird or a cardinal—something small
and please no swans or peacocks:
this, after all, is a play for a congregation
whose ancestors knew Christ without knowing
the beautiful nipples on
Bernini’s Saint Longinus of the nave.)

The bird hops from one
tangled branch of the beards
to another and then stops
where the first beard began—
it looks about as though
this were a path untrodden.

Now the audience—as well as those on the stage and behind it—must think:
Wait! I thought this was only the opening of the play, but is it also the end?

Perhaps it is both—but before an answer:

Lights down (or curtains close).

Adam Meisner lives in Ottawa, where he writes poetry, plays, and fiction. His poems have appeared in literary journals across Canada and the United States, including Poetry is Dead, Plenitude Magazine, and The Iron Horse Literary Review. In 2018, his play For Both Resting and Breeding—about a genderless society in the year 2150—premiered at Talk is Free Theatre in Barrie, Ontario. He is an MFA student in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

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