A Dance of Dreams

By Elise Skidmore

Elise Skidmore is a native New Yorker, who has been writing poetry since she was a child. She feels blessed to have had the best parents, husband, and children a woman could ask for, and the strong bonds of family are often the subject of her writing. Her books of poetry are available both in print and all digital formats.

What people are saying about Elise’s poetry:

Warm and accessible, Ms. Skidmore’s poetry shines. Her love of the simple things, of home and family, evokes memories and feelings common to us all, and her sure hand strokes the iron string that runs through every heart. Kudos.
—Dale Cramer, award winning author of KISS OF THE JEWEL BIRD

If you love poetry, When Leaves Fall will fill a new corner of your heart. If you think you don’t like poetry, its achingly simple beauty will prove you wrong.
—Linda Grimes, author of Tor Books’ Ciel Halligan series

Poignant and lyrical, every sentence is a gem.
—Karen White, NYT bestselling author

• Language: English
• Publisher: Heart Ally Books, LLC
• Release date: Jun 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781631070082

Elise Skidmore

Elise Skidmore is a native New Yorker, who has been writing poetry since she was a child. In 1994, when her husband and several of her friends were trying to get her interested in email and switching from a typewriter to a computer, she stumbled upon Compuserve’s Literary forum (Today it’s called the Books and Writers Community). There she met a bunch of wonderful people, including her favorite author, Diana Gabaldon, who helped broaden her horizons and delve into fiction writing as well as poetry. She eventually joined the staff, spending nearly 10 years as the section leader of the Writing Exercises and in Compuserve’s Poetry Forum. In 2004, when Compuserve opened to the web, she and a friend started a private writers’ forum called SectionSixx, which nurtured writers for more than 10 years.Elise lives on Long Island with her husband of 40+ years and feels blessed to have had the best parents, husband, and children a woman could ask for. The strong bonds of family are often the subject of her writing, but there aren’t many topics she’s afraid to tackle, including stories of vampires, devil possession, WWII POW camps, and gunslingers in the old west.Her hobbies include reading, photography, travel, and making people smile.

Book preview

Dance-epub-cover

A Dance of Dreams

by

Elise Skidmore

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Heart Ally Books

Camano Island, Washington

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Smashwords Edition

A Dance of Dreams

Illustrations and text copyright © 2015 by Elise Skidmore

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

Published by:

Heart Ally Books

26910 92nd Ave NW C5-406, Stanwood, WA 98292

Published on Camano Island, WA, USA

www.heartallybooks.com

ISBN-13: (epub) 978-1-63107-008-2

ISBN-13: (paperback) 978-1-63107-007-5

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Dedicated

To my family,

whose love makes everything possible

&

To my sister, Susan,

who’s been sharing my dance since the beginning

I love you.

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Preface

Poetry has always held a special place in my heart, even if I don’t always understand it. One of my earliest memories is giggling on my father’s knee while he recited a German nursery rhyme. The wonderful rhyming whimsy of Dr. Seuss delights me as much today as it did when I was a child.

I remember my mother collecting little poems she liked—in my mind’s eye I can still hear her reciting Ogden Nash’s Purple Cow and its sequel. Even as a teenager, the lyrics of songs were just as important as the music. When my eighth grade teacher introduced me to T.S. Eliot and Edna St. Vincent Millay (Thank you, Miss Jarmol!), a whole new world of poetry opened for me and I’ve been wandering through it ever since.

Poetry is Life; it is universal. Like life, poetry can send us on flights of joy and sometimes it can break our hearts. Poets gather the world around them, their own experience and the experience of others, to tell a story, to make us think, to remind us we all share the human experience. A picture may speak a thousand words, but a poem can create a picture with a few lines. It is reality and imagination combined. It seeks to make sense out of the senseless, and to bring beauty out of ugliness.

This is why I write poetry and take photographs. There is no sweeter sound than to hear someone say, I know exactly what that’s like. I can see this. I’ve been there. The poems in this book cover a variety of subjects, emotions, and experience. Some I’ve experienced first hand, others came from creative empathy. It’s my hope that you will come away feeling that we have traveled different paths, but we journeyed together on the same road.

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Adagio

a succession of slow, fluid movements performed as an exercise in ballet.

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A Dance of Dreams

We live in a dance of dreams,

glissade from fantasy

to nightmare

and back again.

Sometimes sweet,

Sometimes bizarre,

Sometimes graceful,

Sometimes with the wobbly legs

of a newborn fawn.

We learn new steps

as we jump to unknown futures

and grow confident in choreography

perfected over time.

Sometimes we dance solo,

other times we revel

in glorious pas de deux,

but always we are part of the corps.

Life is but a dream we create;

leap into the dance and let yourself soar.

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Plus One

I grew up watching coffee perked

in a silver pot with a black handle.

My mother always started with cold tap water.

Savarin was her brand of choice