Girl Gone Dancing

‘I got music running in my head
Makes me feel like a young bird flying
Cross my mind and laying in my bed
Keeps me away from the thought of dying
Canta libre, canta a la vida
de mi madre y mi padre...’
Neil Diamond

All day long, since they’d brought her back
from the hospice, she’d sat in reverie; her chair
set down in the garden. A passion for flowers,
she’d always had; observed how they bent
with the breeze, and she leant with them...
feeling their need to rid themselves
of their ugly wooden stakes,
and fraying, dark green twine.

She saw blue-tits peck the pampas grass,
soon to fly away – beaks full of feather-booty
to line their nests. Noticed how light shifts...
how its plumes threw prancing shadows
on the larch-lap fence; a stately sarabande,
and then an unabashed, wild flamenco
as the wind rose; imagined she could even
hear the clack of castanets.

In her mind she trashed that chair of hers –
the ‘umbilical cord’, pumping the rarest of air
to her worn-out lungs; she had no need of it,
not any more, as she ran across the chamomile lawn,
at liberty, unhindered. The sward – soft, forgiving
underfoot, undid the string from the foxgloves;
their unfettered, purple-splendored spikes free
to flirt with the wind.

For the first, and the very last time, she knew
what they meant by ‘coming home’. Overhead,
the sotto voce of the leaves became her canta libre;
her tambourine – the sweet susurrus of sycamores;
as her dirndl skirt twirled and swirled, they whispered,
‘Bon voyage,’ to the girl gone dancing.