Meanwhile, back on set…

A Work in Progress
76

Everyone had left

Donal remained on stage amid a cast of ghosts

given substance by words

in the script

one of Glenn Hughes’ students

had cast Ezra Pound to play himself as well

 as Callimachus presiding over Ptolemy’s library

where he would be an opinionated

cantankerous court poet 

confronted 

by…

she’d cast Briseis from The Iliad to play all the female parts

Lesbia, Ariadne, H.D.

only once the actress avatar for Briseis got trained

by absorbing digital movies literature and social media 

scraped from the world wide web

she wanted to sue all those who had raped her

inspired by E. Jean Carroll

And Ezra’s avatar became Ezra only more so

a compendium of all known literature

the story of his tribe

along with a cast of extras all inoculated by AI

milling about waiting for a call

A dilemma Donal would have liked to discuss

with Glenn Hughes but he was also a ghost

having first proposed actors play multiple parts

they’d all be archetypes keep the budget down 

Ezra and Bacchus and Callimachus

Lesbia Ariadne and H.D.

Aldington Theseus and Catullus

only for his student to cast Briseis to play H.D.

Briseis chosen from Homer’s epic 

whom she thought would give voice to women

even now three thousand years later

suppressed by males 

AI had wrenched her digital characters 

from the Internet’s archive and animated them

changing Briseis from Homer’s conception

a prize slave girl for the Achaeans to vie for

to a woman with a past she’s now going to slay for

Suddenly Briseis jumped from the laptop

stood there before him…

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                        2025