June Month of Poetry #1: Choreomania (Dancing Plagues)

This first mysteries of history poem is inspired by the so-called "dancing plagues" that occurred in Europe across the 14th to 17th centuries. It involved hundreds, or even thousands, of people dancing erratically but continuously for long periods of time for no apparent reason, without music (although sometimes music was added in as an attempt to treat the issue), with some or many of them dying from the exertion. While there are many theories about what caused it (the most popular are ergot poisoning from mushrooms and some kind of mass nocebo / mass hysteria effect), no one knows for certain, and it seems likely that we never will. That certainly doesn't stop me from speculating, though :-)

Dance

if one day you step outside your door and the air

    doesn't seem like it did yesterday, and your neighbour

        isn't beating out her rugs like she does every day but instead is staring, her eyes fixed,    

            at what's coming down the street, and if you turn your head

                straining to see, even as your ears are taking in the sounds of feet on hard ground

                    feet that are not marching and feet that are not walking to market or to church, but

                        feet that are beating an uneven wild tattoo that's getting louder and louder each minute

                            feet calling a weird moonstruck song, although there's no music and no moon either

and if you feel your own feet twitch in response, like they aren't your own anymore

    and your eyes grow large and drink in the things you could never quite see, out there in the out-there

        and your neighbour says wait - no, but wait - and perhaps those mushrooms weren't -

            and you understand, in some corner, that dying lies on the other side of this entrancing

                beyond and within this jerking frenzy, as your legs begin to move and move

                    and your face twists in agony that is also joy that is also fear that is also wonder

                        and your body surrenders itself to the dance that is not a dance and is also every dance

the holiness and cursedness of it mixed together and married in your flesh

    in your sinew and lungs and rushing veins and most all, in your ghost-caught feet

        your small and pale and bony feet, in their rough black leathery shoes

            carrying you away down the road, a tributary flowing into the wide rushing river

                motley and piebald, surging with groaning laughing sobbing praying life

                    dancing because there is no because but there is this

                        the dance, the dance, the dance, and the dark.