Raising Teddy

This one is Stage #9, about Reincarnation



Raising Teddy
(A character in Brien Friel’s play, ‘The Faith Healer”)

I get him out and dust him off
A couple times a year.
His Cockney mouth and tatty robe.
The soiled poster that he saved,
A relic from an old discarded dustbin.
A basket for ‘Rob Roy The Piping Dog’,
Now playing ‘Plaisir d’Amour’, for his encore,
On some grand stage in heaven.
A quavering reedy voice and Fred Astaire’s
‘The Way You Look Tonight”,
His rhapsody to unrequited love.
Checkered pants and striped shirt
And slippers worn from too much dancing
By himself.

But most of all his story,
His glorious comic tragedy,
A promoters flair for turning tawdry truths
To burnished gems of insight.
And then he lives again,
One half-hour of his old life,
And seeing through my eyes.
He tells it all and holds the room rapt
In careful hands.
And when he’s through
They sit both stunned and sobbing,
Cured as he once was,
By a drunken Irish faith healer,
Whom he’s brought back to life.

I get him out and dust him off
And spin him til he stops.
I live in him and he in me,
And together feed
On laughter and fresh tears reborn.