Robert Hodkinson
Dancing at Rudyard
You’ve caught us dancing. All those cramp-jawed smiles,
the ‘Hold it’ postures of wedding days, cast aside;
The Band of the Yeomanry whistles and tubas
for the ladies swaddled in skirts, the men all flat caps and flannels:
grey patches against the clay-white sky, gliding over obdurate grey grass;
a blouse, a shirt-collar, faded to the shade of the dry-stone;
the hills, a smudge of woodland, flattened to a backdrop;
bandsmen the colour of Flander’s mud.
Still the dancing - in the flight of a coat tail, the blur of a hem.
Our lives ran like music through the air. What’s left is our light,
captured in the aperture’s momentary world. It holds us
as heaven is meant to: unchanging, in a dale;
something snatched from summer, to remind you
that we danced at Rudyard.
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