Breaking the Silence
Beautiful people are dancing tonight in
Addis Ababa. I am happy for them and wish
them good dancing. There are beautiful
people all over the world in every country, dancing. I am happy for this. I have always
in my life hoped for dancing all around the world. I am here in the real world and
people are dancing. There is dancing tonight
in Khartoum Pretoria Moscow Washington.
In Ottawa tonight we can watch beautiful careful dancing.
at this point I too begin dancing
Music breaks the silence of this room and
we hear the sound all over the world.
I am dancing here in this room. Here in
this room I weave and stretch in the broken
silence and I dance all around the world.
This global dance is fine, a fine thing.
Beautiful people are dancing together in all
parts of the world and it brings to mind
those first nervous dances so long ago
watching in awe the brash and beautiful
dancing on the gym floor heedless of us
lesser folk holding up the walls in the dark.
here my own dance begins to change
And I begin to understand other ways of
breaking silence. I have called silence
forgetting. My own dance changes from year
to year and now I name my own dance remembering. Some time back I nearly had it perfect, my remembering dance, but I forgot a few moves. I was not alone in this. Some of the
great old moves were forgotten. Do you
remember Bingo dance? One by one the
whole quaking horny junior high school
would be up in the light, dancing. Thinking of
beautiful people dancing tonight in Addis
Ababa and elsewhere I remember the Bingo
dance and I feel like yelling Bingo all around
the world.
here my own dance is like dreaming
We would hear Bingo and soon there wouldn't
be enough beautiful dancers to go around and
the beautiful people dancing tonight would
have to seek out the slightly less beautiful and
the democratic geometry of the junior high
school would add up 2 4 8 16 32 and soon the
beautiful people would be looking everywhere
for new dance partners. The beautiful people
dancing tonight in Addis Ababa would perhaps
find themselves south of town in the camps
and all over the world we would hear, 'you're
not well enough to dance, maybe I can help.'
I have awakened now from the trance
of my dancing and listen to the
silence of my room.