Tiel Aisha Ansari

Skeleton Dance

So it’s a waltz? I’ll let you lead, my friend.
We’re just wasting time waiting for the end.
Icicle bones move under the snowman’s skin
with glacier patience. They say time mends
but also wears the fabric of the world thin.
Give that ancient globe a brand new spin—
it’ll fly apart. Don’t cry over oceans spilled
like milk; that’s how the Milky Way begins.
I tell you only what you know. Time kills.
Seeds wait in old dry lakes for rain to fill
the expectations of a bygone age. Your bones
are ivory and ice, long dry, but still
tatters of skin hang from your fleshless fingers.
A skeleton dancing on while daylight lingers.

Companion Piece — Skeletal Thoughts

What is death? Journey, arrival, beginning, end, final mystery, answer to all questions? A country from which no one returns? Merely a gateway? Nothingness, or ultimate reality?

If I approach this subject poetically, it’s for lack of graspable facts. We can’t know (though we may believe) what death is or isn’t. But we can know how we feel about it; and this is a realm best explored through metaphor and imagery, myth and symbolism. The Kingdom of Death is a kingdom of poetry.

Pieces that went into this poem: You’ve heard that inside every fat man there’s a skinny man struggling to get out? Tim Powers gave that idea a unique twist in his novel Last Call. Terry Pratchett hid Death inside a snowman in the climactic scene of Hogfather. And then there’s the classic Zen image of the gleefully dancing skeleton.

We’re all walking dead; we’re all bones. We might as well dance.