COUNTRY DANCE

• Form sets.


• A chord jags vibrating strings:
• honour your partner. Music wings
• through the echoing barn and our eightfold rings.


• Circle left —
The fiddles are spinning the rhythm and spilling
• familiar melody stirring and spelling
• our minds and our bodies: to magic unspooling
• we whirl a medieval round.


• Circle right —
Impelled by the rhythm, in eager succession,
• (like a flock of starlings in wheeling pulsation)
• widdershins now our revolution,
• purling a medieval round.


• Right-hand star, left-hand star,
• grand chain, pas-de-bas;
• swing your partner, the opposite man,
• strip the willow as fleet as you can.
Through long sets, eighteenth century fashion,
• compelled by the pulsing music’s passion,
• with swirling skirt and skirling feet,
• I follow the fiddles’ urgent beat.


• The music quickens, resolves: and now
• a last chord signals the final bow:
• honour your partner — who has shared with you
• a ritual old as breathing, new
• as your last gulp of oxygen.
• The dance has given us all again
• a sense of self, a sense of place,
• direction, balance, a rush of grace.

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