POEM TITLE
Dancing on the Firth of Forth
POEM
Dancing on the Firth of Forth
Before their eyes -
dancers on the shore.
silhouetted against the castle
fifteen or twenty of them,
whirling and swirling.
The midsummer air was balmy
the water still.
But this was no Jack Vettriano painting of beautiful people dancing and gazing out to sea,
no greeting card perfection of a stylish, suited man taking the lady in red to tango.
These men and women moved with a joyful grace of someone a quarter their age.
Laddie and Lassie viewed the spectacle,
the others had skittered back to the square and last orders at The Lobster Pot.
Before they knew it, she was pulled into the hubbub,
picked up like a child by an elderly dancer,
her hair clips glinting in the moonlight as he took her in his arms.
They revolved slowly at first.
Fishing boats tiny as pin-pricks twinkled
as if stars on the navy-blue water.
around to dark hillsides she twirled.
Hesitation on the boy’s sunburnt face.
They’d met only this afternoon on the train from Edinburgh.
Nevertheless, his feet tapping to the fiddle
until he too was taken – pulled into the tumult.
The woman started at his rough hands – the hands of a manual labourer.
tough and calloused from a childhood spent scaling peaks.
The music stopped.
Laddie and lassie handed back
- to each other.
The music started up
and laddie and lassie danced on.