The Wheel

(Dance with Musicians from a fourteenth-century
illuminated medieval handbook on good health)

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” ~ Ecclesiastes 3:1

THE WHEEL

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow
the dancers rise from their seats.
The dance begins to shape itself
in the crowd, as couples join,
and couples join couples, their movement
together lightening their feet.
They move in the ancient circle
of the dance. The dance and the song
call each other into being. Soon
they are one — rapt in a single
rapture, so that even the night
has its clarity, and time
is the wheel that brings it round.

In this rapture the dead return.
Sorrow is gone from them.
They are light. They step
into the steps of the living
and turn with them in the dance
in the sweet enclosure
of the song, and timeless
is the wheel that brings it round.

~ Wendell Berry, born 1934, American poet, writer, and farmer