Cinematic Poetry
1616 ~ Shakespeare's Last Day
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1616 ~ Shakespeare's Last Day The far and grumbling horizon, I now realize; Is just a map, Running in the background of; What I now know, To be my last day. There was a time before, There were days like this, When the beauty of life's passage, Seemed stayed and steadied in its stilted order. For in the morning, It was like any other. River banks; Running streams about my eyes, And nerves all rooted round, In cycles of quiet permanence. My mind's order, Put best to use upon the page. To seep in supple weeds, Embraced by them, for weeks, Until we are quite far from the breach. In those days before, Lives were lived in dreams beyond, I fertile findings what was truly enlightened.
The Collector’s Edition
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The first panel unfolds within the imagined final hours of William Shakespeare's life. He walks through Stratford-upon-Avon as the ghosts of his greatest characters appear before him ~ Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Iago, and King Lear. Each death represents a different collapse of power: the prince destroyed by conscience, the ruler cut down by ambition, the manipulator consumed by his own deception, the aging king who discovers too late that authority cannot command love. What ultimately becomes of the men who seek to master others? The playwright's final day becomes a vantage point above the stage ~ a moment where art, history, and human ambition reveal themselves as the same drama repeating across generations. Power is never truly owned, only held for a moment before another hand reaches for it. 1616 Collection exhibited at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam ~ Google Gemini Art Remix Competition. Poetry & AI Animation & Music & Produced & Performed by Laurence Fuller.
