The Pearl Dancer Poem by Simon M Hunter

for KM

The Wanderer leaves them behind
“Unkind memories, you and I
Just crooked jags where smiles should be
And wrapped rags rank with misery”

Walking in entwined fields with foreign limbs
Hard heart humming short youth’s long song
An almond dancer by the way
Hot hair in shining pearls and sunned red thumbs

I stayed amazed at zany dance
Shh! Shimmer vision, regained paradise
Through her high blithe legs thornless flowers grew
Raindropped air spiralled at her glance

Then a shadow fell, and I looked upwards
To see a twisted cloud shape form
A she-wolf seeming, scrawny sides bursting
With the greed that has left many thirsting (1)

Her drool fell, fully vision changed
To sweaty places, churny money made
But not by them dripping, rarely
In forgot brown holes unairy

Only in a meat world

“Full of things but centre holey
I am that Lupa who will be
The bees’ hum lost among the trees
Fish suffocate in feeble seas
So much less than this will feed
The scratching of ugly poetry”

Only in a meat world

“Can you find the right fruit-bowed creed?
Silver sun panelled clover dwellings
Endless mind-meadows with their seed.
But not in a meat world gone mad”

And I replied, leaning on luck,
“Perhaps, when all the shifting muck
That runs itself in business
Has worn you outraged with evasions and lies
There will still be the Pearl Dancer’s movement
A cool breeze at sunset, and lines”

(1) Cf. Dante’s Inferno, i.49-51:
Ed una lupa, che di tutte brame
sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza,
e molte genti fé già viver grame