For Dancing on a Spring Evening
The world we know is old; and past are days
When every turning season was so new
That all mankind would dance and sing for joy
At sight of it. For us, time turns in gears—
Each day and season measured out in numbers
As though it were the striking of a clock
Ordained by the exacting mind of man.
What care we if the spring be late or soon?
Is the blooming of the trees, ordained by God
And thus inevitable, cause for joy?
It happened last year, and will come again
(Barring the second coming of the Christ)
So what need have we to mark the event?
Only Pagan peoples would live thus.
Good Christians will commemorate the life
And crucifixion of our risen Lord
As ordered by Byzantium’s time-clock—
To honor Mother Earth is now to pay
False homage to a long-forgotten god.
And yet there is a holiness unmarked
In unshod feet that dance upon new grass
And hair unbound that spills upon our shoulders
To welcome warm caresses of the wind.
What man can truly comprehend the great
Inexorable spinning of the cosmos
Unless he does as we do, and with arms
Extended into gath’ring shadow, dances
The twirling of the planets ’till he falls, breath-
Less to Earth? We are no longer women bowed
Beneath the burden of the first transgression
But daughters of the deity, returned
For one brief night into forgotten Eden
There to sing our hymns and prayers in
Laughing with the whispers of the trees.
And when at length our dancing feet are still,
Made lead by our implacable mortality,
And we creep back in silence to our beds,
The scent of hyacinth and dew-washed grass
Surrounds us while we sleep, infusing
All our dreams with longing for that heaven
Where all will dance unshod on holy ground.
Rose is an undergraduate at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, where she studies English, French, editing, and how to cook for herself without starting inadvertent fires. She dances barefoot on the first warm night of every spring.
