ORLA'S DANCE

Orla’s Dance

(From Derry Girls, season 3 ep. 7)

Joy is a wallflower,
Depressionistas hog the floor,
Disillusion is a religion
Riven by sectarian violence,
Grievance and greed gunning each other down
In an endless series of Bloody Sundays.

The camera has long ago groomed the smile
Into a cipher or logo,
But Orla makes silly faces for the wee photograph
That goes on the card with more bang
Than any bomb or gun of Belfast,
Picks the one with bugged eyes and mouth agape
That funhouse mirrors the shock of a people
Given a way out of eternal war and sorrow;
The merry smuggler, she pockets the card along with the contraband
And sails out the door to a day uproarious with reckonings,
Her birthday – her adulthood – Good Friday’s peacehood -
Up for grabs.

Now all Derry is her dance floor,
She vamps across the wee skybridge
Shimmies and spins down the high street
That is liquid with the laughter of her moves,
Scoops a cream horn like an edible baton
From a beaming old auntie,
Whirls to match the silken swirls,
Then buries her being
In the sweet lightness overflowing
The penny ha’penny horn of plenty.

Now joy is a pied piper,
Wee girls skip in to join her dance,
In dresses like all the gardens of Kilkenny
They do a round of the demure stepdance
That mists the eyes of all the mournful mothers
From mystic Hibernia to the Famine to these Troubles;
On a day when even the dead play hookey
It’s a sight to make them pause their sun-drunk mischief
And raise a pint of the Guinness-flecked air.

And now a wave of even smaller girls
Ripples into the dance, and it breaks
Into unbridled pop,
The sultry mechanics of all those moves
When the land swooned to Sinnead and Dolores;
Now Orla swims her arms in the drum-drenched air,
Now she throws them wide as the girls wheel round,
And so it is, an endless ever-freshening circle of tiny dancers
As we grow up, and grow old, and cross into memory and beyond.

Now Orla soars alone over the rooftops
High above the mossy spine of Derry,
Though it’s only a trick of perspective
(The Joycean camera, finally joining the fun)
She seems weightless, half airborne
Stepping from quarter time to eight to sixteen
In the quickening heartbeat of her dance;
Now black bollards line the war-wounded street
Like the hardbitten rear guard of fear’s retreat,
But Orla grabs them like shy boys at the debs,
Spins them breathless until the sidewalk itself
Pirouettes under their boots;

Bang - she bounces off a soldier at the checkpoint.
Orla falls to earth. The music cuts. Her face darkens.
She insists, where there has never been room for plea,
Much less demand – “I need to get past.”
A thing till now beggaring belief, a fairytale
The soldier stiffly steps aside,
And Orla clicks her heels high at Bishopsgate
And steps into the ever-widening window of sky
Sneaking the contraband, joy, from her girlhood to the days beyond.

In the sliver of memory when I’m gone
This is all you need to know:
That my soul danced through life like Orla,
Defying the gravity of disillusion;
Stealing childlike wonder
Through the stoniest checkpoints;
Smuggling whimsy into my latest years,
And joy, that I sip where I once swilled
Like you do something rare, well-aged
And spirituous as a spring day in Derry, distilled.

Craig Constantine was born in San Francisco. After tramping most of the American west and Canada, he has landed for a time in LA. He’s been a bread baker, furniture mover, factory worker, and TV producer. His poem Tahoe Blue can be see in the current edition of The Crank/UK. Craig, Stacey and Chris Constantine live in a haunted house with a treacherous rock-lined pool called Little Tahoe