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Gibbet dance

 

 

On the black and one-armed gibbet flaunt
The dancing, dancing paladins,
The devil’s paladins, the gaunt
White skeletons of Saladins.
 
Messire Beelzebub tugs each one’s tie,
And sets his grinning jumping-jacks a-prancing
To Christmas carols, black against the sky,
And kicks their polls to keep them dancing, dancing!
 
The hurtled jumping-jacks enlace gaunt arms.
Like organs black, with gaping ribs they groan,
Once clasped by damozels of tender charms,
And knock in hideous love, with bone ’gainst bone.
 
Yo-ho! you paunchless jolly jiggers, caper
And buck! your boards are roomy; shake your pins!
Scuffle and foot it while the frenzied scraper
Beelzebub saws his raucous violins.
 
Hard heels, you’ll wear out no more cumbering sandals!. . .
Bare bones, you've doffed your irksome shirts of flesh!
You're seemly now; no flesh, and so no scandals.
Your skulls are clad in snow caps white and fresh.
 
On cracked heads crows are plumes; on bony chins
Quake rags of flesh still; spinning paladins
In sombre clashes and macabre lights
Seem stiff and jostling, cardboard-armoured knights.
 
Ho! whistling winds have joined the bony band!
The gibbet booms, as organs boom and swell!
From violet forests wolves make answer, and
The crimson skyline glows with reds of hell . . .
 
Hi! shake those graveyard captains, winds, for me,
Who play with broken fingers their tattoo
And stealthy love-songs on pale vertebrae!
No convents here, my grisly, charnel crow!
 
But lo! amid the gruesome dance a corse
—A tall mad skeleton—’gainst the lurid sky
Leaps up in fury, like a rearing horse;
Feeling his neck clutched by the rope on high,
 
He grips and breaks his thigh-bone with a crack
That bursts out like a sneering laugh, and then,
As clowns with one spring reach their booth, bounds back
And joins the dance of clacking bones again.
 
On the black and one-armed gibbet flaunt
The dancing, dancing paladins,
The devil’s paladins, the gaunt
White skeletons of Saladins.
 
 
 
 

Arthur Rimbaud

 
 
 
Dance Poetry
A comprehensive anthology
Edited by Alkis Raftis
Copyright 2012

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