First Impressions

What impressions could I expect

Of two dozen incarcerated women

Impersonating British gentlemen and ladies?

Most never laid eyes on Pride and Prejudice

Until they were handed the cumbersome dialect,

Adapted for the stage.

Some admitting they could not finish the book,

Several preferring the zombie-enhanced movie,

They collapsed the courtships of the Bennets,

Laced with their frank impressions,

Into ninety minutes.

Jane Austen would have been charmed.

The inmate-dramatist  Oscar Wilde

Would have roared his pleasure.

For me, pride and pathos overflowed,

So amazed at the clarity and pace of the dialogue,

So delighted by the futile match-making of adults,

By the meaningful Bennet-glances

To ward off clueless suitors,

Other sisters charging into matrimony.

The actors made me proud

As if they had been my students.

And how do I explain the pathos

That squeezed tears from me

Over a comedy of manners?

Because

I could not forget where I was

Who these dauntless women were

How much confronted and overcome,

How much risked and renounced

To deliver a two hundred-year old drawing room comedy

With spirited excess.

Two dozen stories, within this story,

Grabbing at my heart.