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The Dance
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The Dance

The leaves were dancing

And prancing and whirling, and twirling,

Like a top with dizzy abandon,

And I leapt and I stepped to their lively Borree',

In the blustering street where I make myself home.

With us was waving,

The grass and the shrubbery,

Green shiny leaves,

Flailing for joy.

They tossed back and forth

Uprooting their fear

And the leaves and the wind and the lawn and I danced

To the tune of the skies.

But to my surprise,

The cumulus masters were moving

So slowly in the blue.

They processed entirely slow and exceedingly stately, eyeing the Earth.

And they seemed to be saying,

To my flourishing friends:

"Your movement is lurid, horrid, disgusting

Some spirit has trapped you into a trance.

Like a reptile, it will hold you, if you keep up your prancing."

But the grass and myself

Just laughed and kept jumping

And shouting like oceans slapping the rocks.

And I thought of E. A. Poe,

With all his dread lore,

And his moping and groping

In the darkness of night.

All his clamoring bells

And howling of cats

And the rapping and tapping

 

On his dark chamber door

With that bad Raven waiting and shiny

Like an oil drowned fish,

On the sledge of the shore.

The Raven perches droning,

And crying, "Lenore"  

Bringing depression and sadness

On the thick midnight air.

And I thought of how Poe

And his bloodthirsty words

Hissed at the daylight

And the calling of birds and the grass

And the bushes and pirouetting wind

And my most happy dancing

With the "Firebird" of leaves.

I looked up and thought

How Poe and those clouds,

Both moved and are moving

Like prisoners of Sorrow,

And I stopped.

And was saddened.

Then I took back to dancing

And whirling with leaves,

In the gold and red autumn

With my partners the trees.

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© 1987 - Scott Lawrence Lawson