Vanessa Redgrave is Cleopatra with her face white as winter, and her neck exhausted from the weight of thoughts, and she begins from a place of rooted pain, a rattling thunder, and then she speaks —

… his face was as the heavens
and therein stuck a sun and moon
which kept their course
and lighted the earth …

A breeze, perhaps her breath, catches her hair of thinning silver. It casts a critical shadow across her face, her shining moon of frailties. This woman, though which one I am not sure, as one is the other and the other is the one. She walks with crowns and condemns shadows to quiet -— into the size of dreams.

Are we for the dark —
a promise and pleasure,
a puppet for the moon.

Notes: ref to Anthony and Cleopatra by W Shakespeare, Act 5 Scene 2. This haibun is written…