Vignettes from an Angel’s Visit

Every single one of you is an aftermath. That is to say, you are the sum of your experiences, yes, you are the sum of their parts, and so is everything else! So, an ergonomic chair, is a cushion made of deer skin, is the bark of a tree. Do you get it? If the majority of people do not deem fifty years ago to be recent history, and you don’t, what hope do you have with five hundred, five million? I want to show you that you, in all of your modernity, have not ‘progressed’ past existing on the earth(!) – so you may feel the celestial dust in your bones, just waiting to be mined for the magic of eternal life! Mesmeric life. And this dust will sparkle on every leaf of your life: in the eyes of your lover, in the way they look back at you – you will see each other as the best of the universe. You hit some of life’s roadblocks; you lose your job, you painfully break a bone, but you sleep with a smile. Marvel at this senseless elixir, drink it!

Not once did she speak for me,

this smiling cosmos, this cylinder brimming

with the nectar of dazzle.

How many lifetimes would it take to fashion

your rays again? I’m tripping up on your wave,

pouring water on the wires as I walk.

I don’t want this to explode.

I am a proximity mine, you are its detonator.

I want to hold you like the winged trinkets of the ocean

we both write about. I know their jangle. I know

I’d have to travel back to the ocean if I lost them.

Where would I go to find you if I lost you?

I could cling only to the deflated air of our separation

press on the muzzle of my heart to feel you

or ask my veins if they can shoot out your rays.

I’m not sure if you were crying

the red smoke

your icy eyelashes

primordial as the PS2 error message

teeming with ocean trinkets

I wait in the space between your eyebrows

like a stranded dendron finding the rhod

maligned by the mystery it makes me shiver

but I am buzzing with life

my eyes are an oceanic imaginary

Who else’s heart is lampooned by the rhetoric of forget… which cliff’s edges will be far enough that the wind won’t whisper my poetry into her subconscious? Maybe that’s the issue, maybe I need to scream. But what use is magic when her heart doesn’t believe it? The magic reveals itself when it is believed, it is its most lively and bold, the celestial dust will dance and crystallise in the bones. Just one beam up the arm might be all it would take to straighten your back and paint you the indelible smile of the infinite; for the magic to swim through your eyes with its warmth and knowing.

Sometimes I feel that my issue with her is not a personal fight: maybe it’s a fight with the world. It’s as if the fumes from aeroplanes have sewn the air with nihilism. Oh, and it’s on me to ‘acclimatise’? I don’t like this climate, this is barely oxygen! Why should I settle for muted love, muted air? Is it not virtuous of me, as an angel, to show humans what they’re missing – no - what is bubbling inside them just waiting to please the wind? Imagine if they were to die thinking they couldn’t live forever! My silence is murder, and my wings a vehicle to mesmeric, complete life.

Angel’s Bone is the Pulitzer Prize-winning opera-theatre work by composer Du Yun and librettist Royce Vavrek – performed by the English National Opera at Aviva Studios from 12 to 16 May 2026. Find out more here.