Daily Poem Entries

This, Too, Is Dance

This, Too, Is Dance

I remember old people,
cardigan clad, slippered
and held fast
in a sedentary existence,
yet ready ever to hum
or sing a stately song
of love and life
in the long ago.
Those still mobile
might shuffle together
a few halting steps on the floor,
obedient yet to the gentle call
of songs remembered
when all else has gone.

Even then I laughed,
imagining my generation,
decades in the future,
bodies bent with pain,
but still donning jeans
and T-shirt every morning,
finding it hard to face the fact
of too many years being young,
incapable now of the wild
gyrations we called dance,
but listening, still listening,
to the music of our heyday.

Ancient now and barely mobile
for short bursts of careful travel,
I know full well the irony
of me, king of cool, brought low
in a future I never expected,
having decided in youthful vanity
that I’d be dead by the age of forty,
yet still here when close to
double my expected span.
The music in my ears
(still working though not as well),
pounding out the beat
of the hallowed sixties,
draws the same response
from my aching bones,
the legs, no longer trusted
to dare a hurried step,
but with toe tapping,
shoulders swaying,
head nodding,
I do the geriatric dance,
last defiance of the nursing home.


Line Count: 48
Free Verse
For The Daily Poem: WdC Birthday Edition, Sept. 03 2020
Prompt: Dancing in an unusual place.