Danniel Schoonebeek, 'The Dancing Plague'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

The Dancing Plague

Who was the woman who lived in the kingdom behind the barrier.
There are those who will tell you she was the wife of every man in the village.
And one night while her husbands were finishing their day at the gasworks,
the woman was boiling oats for her only child,
a young girl who’d amassed a beautiful collection of spoons in her life,
each one given to her by one of her mother’s husbands.
And this same night the young daughter died.
And the woman buried the daughter with her spoons in her pockets.

Come daybreak the hostiles appeared at the barrier with ice in their beards.
“To hell with Pax Americana,” they said.
And they camped outside the wall that night chanting war cries.
You say you want to know the names of the war cries that survived history.
“Wheel the gun carriages up to the barrier of the empire of husbands.”
“Our first word is ruin and our next word is value.”

There are those who will tell you the hostiles carried on like this for some weeks.
Until one night the dead daughter led them behind the barrier,
through a tunnel she’d dug in the earth with her spoons.
It was thus the hostiles made it their business to burn everything.
They burned the village crops and the distillery.
They burned the apothecary, the potash mine.
Black soot fell on the livery and they burned the livery too.
And there’s another war cry that’s since survived history:
“Tonight like god’s scalp in your kingdom behind the barrier
our burning makes snow and ends nowhere.”

( You say, where were the village husbands while all of this was happening. )

By Danniel Schoonebeek