THE GREAT BEAUTY

As Best Foreign Film awards go, last night’s Academy Award acknowledgment will go unnoticed by the masses.

The Great Beauty
                   by Odin Roark

How short lived
This laughter made for releasing
Buried in the tragedian
Locked in the universal clown costume
We

You and me

We might watch Fellini’s balloons part
But the message of La Dolce Vita
Has faded into paparazzi history
Or perhaps
Never was

But

Taking up the Master’s baton
Paolo Sorrentino runs like a gazelle
His Great Beauty
Revisiting the question

A man lent to us
Provides a moment
Where one’s man for the ages
For our lifetime
A sufferer for both woman and man
Torn between the paternal instinct
And imagined freedom…
Becomes alone
Yet all-embracing

Such a price
We might say

Italy’s microcosmic decline
Man’s countenance on trial
His worth awaiting
A Christie's auction

Everything with its levy

Yet

What price the good life?
The good life seldom realized?

The kind lived
Then rebuked in
The Great Beauty?

Oh to seek
The unanswerable
Not the self-cocooning
Of “I know”
And the peace of inner-nothingness
Sublime’s secret

Like Sorrentino’s protagonist
We all live in bubbles
The question is about choice
Your bubble
Or
Mine?