The Dance: Sapphire Beach, St. Thomas, 1970.

The Dance: Sapphire Beach, St. Thomas, 1970
~ for Rich

   It seems to me that there was a time,
   and it was before you and I--perhaps,
   the grasshopper age, when, through
   no fault of their own, they sensed
   that daylight is the foreplay of night.
   Even the moon and stars were once
   said to worship the sun as if daring
   to ask, why it, not them, is the center
   of the universe, the same way you and I
   believed that dancing in the ocean
   at midnight would keep us between love's
   empty spaces, like the pull of gravity
   connecting and reconnecting at any
   given moment, always moving forward

Billie Travalini

Wilmington University