Her beginning blossoms With bright curiosity, And love is an airy, fleeting glance As she dances with arched steps To bouncing melodies. Her organic beauty Glides along the dewy grasses, Smelling sweet of the days When life has broken stillness. Slowly, her spark of vitality flares, Flowering into insatiable passion. Her youth is realized, Kissing lightly by age. Given a hand to dance along, She embraces the steady rhythm, Hazed by stale heat, Choked with calm laziness Under blazing lights Heavy with potential?s burden, Smothered in inky silence. As her vitality wanes, ebbing away, Her tune becomes lethargic. She has come of age. There is work to be done And endings are sharp, cold. Her still bones, no longer supple, Snap jointed pops As nipped harvest awakens, Peeking its slivered eye across A blanket of crystalline down While bones crack in the chill-- Fires laid by crumpled paper-hands To start their fog-breathed beginnings. Then quiet reigns After the gunshot of the first snap, Introducing the tumbling first notes To begin their rhythmic, static cadence, Rousing the slumbering aged, Who had ached with vitality so long ago. The small fluting notes, Thin in timbre as they whistle, ice Dry bones chilling them to dust. And minus the varied measures With slighted steps of ghosts, Silence blankets her dance Until once more, the curtain rises, The orchestra plays its splashing notes, And the dancer lights upon arched steppes.