Dervish: Potential Space

Creative risk? I venture to rail against the theocracy that enslaves half of an entire population. How many da Vincis, Edisons, Hemingways, Gödels, Mozarts, or Rembrandts are surrounded by the black cloud of divinely ordained propriety? How our world progresses at only half potential!

But who am I to pass judgment on sacred texts as if they were misogyny?

I am a gynecologist, that's who! I have a say. I chose my specialty for a reason, to honor the sex that reeks of humanity on all levels.

So, yes, I took a big risk with this one. I can't abide hiding such beauty and potential for reasons by which we have no right to pontificate. But then, I never could see the sense of not eating meat on Fridays.

I wanted to poetically weep over this colossal waste of potential, on such a large scale. I wanted to write and edit it along certain creative motifs:

• The beauty of women, even though through the narrow slit graciously allowed for just their vision to navigate a man's world
• The beauty of dance, as a communiqué in itself
• How the motions of dance tell a story, nuanced with a flail here and a twirl there...
• The ethnic uniqueness of art, with words of motion and limbs, limber and feminine, and how they can state—not so obviously—the obvious to me
• And the tragedy, enacted by men, but mistaken as divine word, as interpreted by the self-appointed: the waste of a massive demographic

Stanza by stanza, my thinking's revealed. (I will follow this with the entire poem.)

Swirls of surrender to invisible axis

Slippery sinews in rotational praxis

Sibilant motion, flailed arms to akimbo

And centrifugal limb, in retraction, collapses

This is a motion stanza, describing the dance as following an axis around which the motions are centered. Limbs (sinewy) follow a learned dance, a practiced technique. A susurrus of an imaginary wind stirs from this tornado, varying via how her arms retract or extend as her legs keep the motion around that axis.

Ejaculative passions drive ululations

Emote passions, torquing dancers' dervish gyrations

The eyes speak all from slit-sighted naqib

A woman's somewhere, in there, in operation

Ejaculation is an old word, originally meant to be an exclamation, bursting out, typically of a religious sentiment. "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" But that is the Christian version. In another culture, it comes out in measured beats of ululation. One would think that her eyes say it all because they are the only things that can. But they are only part of the message. The other parts are the outbursts that punctuate the movements and the motions of the dervish itself. These construct a consortium of the woman behind the mask, the sounds of exaltation, and the movements telling her story.

Beauty of motion, bodies in space

Incapable of denying themselves of their place

A woman of flesh, concealed, hidden beneath

Choreographed densities of pent hope and grace

This dance, this dervish, is beauty in action, simply by occupying space and then filling it with the art of motion, along with the music, where the medium is the message. But there's something sinister at work. The dancer is constrained unnaturally. She cannot rebel or deny how she must present herself. She must accept her lot in life because it is ordained. Her biggest organ, her skin, is not functional. Other acts of grace and femininity—and the love that can only be delivered by muliebrity, are at work here.

Twirls and spins belie flywheel wrought,

Put into motion what's more than the art

The madness of dance is fueled desperation

To be wholly human past rote counterpart

But she also dances for her sisters. It is a sororal code launched by the physics of motion. She expresses her rage to become fully human, instead of merely exposed as unexposed—a tease, a promise, for all the wrong reasons.

Machinations in steps, phased with lunation

Present her fertility in periodic rotation

Merely one aside, among many in progress

The dancer circles many things' interrelation

Consider what women do! They provide the continuation of the human race, evolved on a planet whose moon calls the shots. We have evolved on a world of circadian instructions, but there is the fine print for women, provided by lunar months, that cycle them for a divine purpose—and it's not a divine purpose of hiding themselves!

Witness that expressed at the behest of acrobatics

Rising aerially to levels of sorties' aerobatics

Dances need not be policies of happiness

But rage at the disfranchising theocratics

Watch what they say thanks to their dance, imbued with the art of motion and acrobatics, into the air. They can dance in duality:

1. They are joyous, albeit a private joy
2. They are angry, forced to eschew self-actualization

Don't be hoodwinked by her annular haste

And don't feel her call-to-waggle is based

On following behind another gender

Half the Earth is a terrible thing to waste

Don't be fooled by the tease, engendered by the male sex for male sex boasting. They boast themselves with their message—a full message from a full human being, because wasting the potential of half the Earth's beings is a sin for which the Divine will render judgment.

_____________

BELOW IS THE UNINTERRUPTED POEM

Swirls of surrender to invisible axis

Slippery sinews in rotational praxis

Sibilant motion, flailed arms to akimbo

And centrifugal limb, in retraction, collapses

.

Ejaculative passions drive ululations

Emote passions, torquing dancers' dervish gyrations

The eyes speak all from slit-sighted naqib

A woman's somewhere, in there, in operation

.

Beauty of motion, bodies in space

Incapable of denying themselves of their place

A woman of flesh, concealed, hidden beneath

Choreographed densities of pent hope and grace

.

Twirls and spins belie flywheel wrought,

Put into motion what's more than the art

The madness of dance is fueled desperation

To be wholly human past rote counterpart

.

Machinations in steps, phased with lunation

Present her fertility in periodic rotation

Merely one aside, among many in progress

The dancer circles many things' interrelation

.

Witness that expressed at the behest of acrobatics

Rising aerially to levels of sorties' aerobatics

Dances need not be policies of happiness

But rage at the disfranchising theocratics

.

Don't be hoodwinked by her annular haste

And don't feel her call-to-waggle is based

On following behind another gender

Half the Earth is a terrible thing to waste