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Dancing in County Clare
It is Sunday night.
The pub is shaped
like a horseshoe magnet.
A fiddle and concertina
play at one end,
their music rough
like the broken end
of a whetstone.
A dance is in progress
where the current
moves both ways.
The girls are mini-skirted,
white as gulls.
The men are in church clothes,
dark as ravens.
They rise, glide and dip,
slanting in, slapping
their feet on the cement
like surf under
the cliffs at Dereen.
© 2002, Dudley Laufman
The English-language alphabet originally had only 24 letters. One missing letter was J, which was the last letter to be added to the alphabet. The other latecomer to the alphabet was U.
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
~Carl Sandburg, Poetry Considered
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