A Poem by John Greening

After Rilke: Spanish Dancer

As a pale strip of wood and phosphorus
will send out sparky tongues before the head
flares up at your fingers, so these close watchers
see it flickering near, her dance, where it catches
hot, bright, quick in their circle and has spread.

And suddenly it’s flame, simple as that.

One look and it’s her hair she’s set alight
then impulsively twists her entire dress
into this furious pyre with bold finesse,
from which her naked arms stretch out like snakes
alarmed and rattling at each move she makes.

And then, as if she has outgrown the fire,
she takes and hurls the live thing to the floor
haughtily, with imperial disdain
looking down at it, an impotent skin
of flaring rage that offers no concession.
In triumph, sure of herself, and with a sweet
smile on her face she moves into position,
and stamps it out with small unerring feet.

John Greening (b.1954) is a Bridport Prize and Cholmondeley Award winner. He has published over twenty collections large and small, including The Silence (Carcanet, 2019), and has edited Grigson and Blunden along with several anthologies. His collected essays, Vapour Trails (Shoestring), appeared in late 2020. The following year saw publication of his chapbook, The Giddings, his edition of Iain Crichton Smith; and an anthology of country house poems, Hollow Palaces (with Kevin Gardner). There was a further pamphlet in 2022, Omniscience, from Broken Sleep, who are also bringing out his prose memoir, A High Calling, in early 2023; and a selection of his Goethe translations has just appeared from Arc. Next March, Baylor University Press are bringing out his American Selected: The Interpretation of Owls: Poems 1977–2022, edited by Kevin Gardner.