Dancing and Danger

Two sisters, not more than three or four,
Twisted and twirled in tight, bright circles
Across the floor of Your World Coffee
Near where I sat last Saturday morning.

Loud and crowded as it was at that hour,
Then between ten and eleven, the attention
Of most centered around them-in-motion.
Each human move was only another moon
Revolving around their haloes, bright-as-noon-
Their face-to-face grins, the fairy rings they made.

Arm-in-arm, heart-oblivious of hardness or harm, there they spun
Under the soft, charmed looks and legs of a parade of patrons
Who, by angel-graceful evasions, saved their day for fun:
Each peach-pink turn done under a certain assumption,
Some girlish assertion (if you will) all will turn out well,
Even come (what some will call) high water or hell.

Even when their weary mother warned, ‘Careful,
Girls, people are walking with coffee’, no more
Notion had they of any danger while dancing
Than any of us here had of too much caffeine
Being harmful for veins, hearts or even our brains.
(Just the same as babes in knowing our dangers,
Each treacherous step we take just as calmly
As if we’d ever live amid amity, never calamity-
As we’d walk in the park any sunny May Sunday
With every weed we’d see seeming a lower flower).

Be that as it may, there they were in their own world
And whirled on as though they’d never heard a word
From their mother over there looking so otherworldly
In her chair; know, now, how so like those two dancers
We too are (dear, daring, unwary reader) with our God.

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