Tiny Dancer

Dedicated to my aunt Saundra, 'Saunie.' She danced her way through life until she was diagnosed with systematic lupus in her sixties. I wrote this for her as she held her dying husband's hand.

She danced her way through life, 

Feet that looked like silver minnows, racing 

In the rainbow lines. She shifted like an angel, bending the midnight sky, 

A flash of something, which 

The scholars ponder, before taking up a pencil, just to 

Scribble with a fever only great 

Discovery could engender. A thing of light, which moved 

Between the galaxies, perplexing every naked eye. 

She glided like a spirit, nothing 

In this life would offer,

Caught between the hands that tried 

To catch her, when she let them glide around her waist,

Encircling the dip between

Her bust, and down below her narrow thighs. She danced her life away, as if

Nothing but a dream could ever

Go inside, and truly understand her mind. She took a man, he held his

Tiny Dancer to the end, and . . . 

Long past the point when her feet would make 

Those bewildered eyes, of a starstruck 

Audience open 

Wide, like flashes in a galaxy, had befuddled their 

Sorry minds,

That seamless grace and talent, out of context on

The parquet, Heaven must have rendered it with something 

Barely understood by man. That thing that preachers call the true 

Divine.The hand which held her, like 

A mitton, catching her, whenever she allowed the roving 

Fingers to enclose,

The dream-like figure, she surrendered, to 

Their aching love and passion, in the beating heart that,

Stood beside her, to the end, even when they

Only tapped it- those feet, they tracked a mantra in the 

Ground beneath- i love you, i love you, i love you,

To the last, never caring that she could

No longer dance, because there was a secret to 

That Tiny Dancer’s strange performance from the past. It wasn’t, 

Something in the Heavens or a 

UFO encounter. It was love, which kept those feet together,

Love, that gave the little body fire, and kept it

Burning, even 

In the dead of winter, long into the final days, 

When two 

Aging, fragile lovers, put 

Their hands together, and held on tight-

Looked into each other’s eyes and said that they were 

Ready, to go into the

Next life. 

Em ~ 

Author's Note

Credits for the photo to Felipe Almeida on Unsplash