Dancing, Naturally

A murmur of whirring wings,
an eddy of starlings
converges and separates
in the helices and pirouettes
of an aerial ballet.

Follow the moon and Earth
as they trip a tantric
light fantastic,
cheek to cheek, face to face,
inhaling each other’s breath.

Why let words get stuck
somewhere between us
when hands and bodies talk?
Express them in movement,
in the way you dance and walk!

Kim M. Russell, 30th January 2024

Image by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash

Mish is the host at this week’s Tuesday Poetics at the dVerse Poets Pub, and she asks: May I Have This Dance?

She says that much like poetry, dance ‘gives us a vessel for communicating our thoughts, releasing emotions, honing our skills and creating our own unique stories and style’, and that ‘dance can fill our hearts with joy or move us to tears’. She has given examples of poems that illustrate this, by Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou and Tonelius Oliver, and a wonderful poem by Sarojini Naidu.

Mish asks us to write poems on the theme of dance: our first dances; dances rooted in our culture; dance as a metaphor for life or romance; memories of dancing; and we can even play with rhythm, rhyme, repetition, enjambment and line breaks to mimic the choreography of a dance. I’m posting and linking up early as we’re out celebrating our anniversary this evening.

46 thoughts on “Dancing, Naturally”

  15. The birds who live in huge pines in our back yard do indeed seem to be dancing with each other, I love watching them cavort about. Lovely poetry, KIm and a huge thank you for the comment you left on my Last Dance. Gordon’s loss is impossible to express with mere words. I hired him at the travel agency I ran in 1992 .. instant friend, a force of nature, a friend to thousands ’round the world, my confidant, the best travel buddy ever. On our first cruise crossing the Atlantic, he named me “Rose” … He was my “Jack” .. nutty over the movie Titanic. We remained so forever.

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