Blog - Wednesday Poems

Image:  Come Dance With Me (oil and cold wax on cradled panel, 16” x 16”)

Tonight, the Lantern Festival will once again take place at Vancouver’s Trout Lake Park. This festival started out as the Illuminares, organized by the Public Dreams Society in 1989. At the time, we lived just up from the park, and the festival was meant to be a local arts and culture event, a model for other city communities to take up in their neighbourhoods.  As it happened, the Trout Lake festival became such a big hit, everyone flocked to it rather than create the intended smaller events throughout the city. In just a few years it grew to attract thousands of people. 

We stopped going when it got so crowded you could hardly take in any of the acts.  But that first one – it was so very special.  A few hundred people from the area gathered to slowly walk around the lake, lanterns in hand, pausing often to enjoy a variety of performances. A choir of women singing in the huge willow tree by the swimming area; a musician playing jazz (saxophone, as I recall) on a raft in the middle of the lake; fire breathers and jugglers and more at other stops.  A highlight for me that year was two men dancing. It looked to me like they were performing some kind of martial art in tandem. Not as battle, but as beauty.  Which is what inspired me to write Dance (from my book, Bewildered Rituals, Polestar Press) – today’s Wednesday Poem.

Dance

This is how the body can move –
with grace and fortitude.
Remember them, two men
to the beat of one drum,
their gymnastic limbs swinging
over and under, around
in the soft night air of a park;
karate kicks just this far from skin
never come to blows;
hands open into air
slow motion, a precision pose –
anger transformed to the beautiful
in a dance.

In a dance,
anger transformed to the beautiful
slow motion, a precision pose –
hands open into air
never come to blows;
karate kicks just this far from skin
in the soft night air of a park,
over and under, around
their gymnastic limbs swinging
to the beat of one drum.
Remember them, two men
with grace and fortitude –
This is how the body can move.
 

A year or so after I watched these men dance, we visited Pender Island, where I picked up a chapbook that included a palindrome – a poetic form I’d not encountered before (see Wednesday Poem #10 for more about this). It struck me that this form might nicely embody the back and forth movement of the dance I saw during that first magical Illuminares festival.