The Dance of the Glass Sword
The dancer twirled the Glass Sword and the drummers of the circle told her how:
Out of many, one. One out of many
Blood is all red, have you any?
Gold of the dead, bright and heavy
Our souls have bled, slow and steady
She thumped her hips in cacophonous frenzy, with such powerful, cyclic hypnosis that the boy’s mouth went dry. He had to bite his lip to keep from fumbling the beat. The dancer let loose a velvet ribbon and began an offbeat spin.
Her spirit began to claw its way from her body, making more progress with each twirl –one circle, then two, then it seemed it would never end, but the girl’s ethereal self, a luminous green likeness made a contorted welling up of herself as she shed her body like a coat, catapulting herself from the tornado of the ribbon's twirl.
She landed in the center of the drumming circle and bowed.
“Am I not skilled? Am I not your Holy Communicant?” she seemed to say with the gesture.
Then she began a haunting poem and cabaret, in a voice that echoed off of walls unseen:
All will return to sand
such sweltering, heathens’ fairness
chained, sunken kings who promised land
compressing seas into a sword of glass
We raise the new millennial blood
of every tribe from Eden thus
to slash through armors of russet time
Instead of deathwork, blades of love
The rocks will hold no strength
when Taino gold awakens
under skeletons like statues
in the deep and ghostly world
We will travel through the shamans
through the songmanship of ash
and find the treasure of the corners
of our ancestry, our faces
All the pride without the fall
All the love without the loss
We are free again
We are healing men
Such pained awe swept through the boy. His tears began to wet his drum. As he looked about the clearing, he saw the others similarly enthralled by her verses.The mesmerizing loop of the ribbon was as absolute and visceral as a flick of blood on a battlefield.
Eternity was found. Was it through visions of death or of transcendence? There was no differentiating.
And then the spirit disappeared, and the drumming slowed and tinkered out as a downpour of rain might: a lightening-fettered abuse reduced to drizzle. Only the bass drum remained. Only the thunder, the world shattering thunder.
Skin glistened with sweat. Eyes, black and dazzled with strain became visible in what seemed a residual glow, the aftershock of the girl's momentous spirit dancing. It might have been nothing at all. Although everyone saw it, no one spoke.
The dancer, she fainted, dropping the ribbon and the Glass Sword to the dirt in a pool of red and shimmer.
And it was the boy who rose to lift her to her hammock, where her spirit would return before the dawn.
