'genuflect through showering roses' — poetry by Leila Lois

Rose fall

The piano awakens~

ivory fingers trace memories,

as her gown cascades, like spilled bathwater

over weathered walnut.

A floregium of critique in grayscale captures;

"one body, one soul.” *

His arms, a laurel bower,

the Opera House flares with gold;

the audience “in rapture.”

He guides her pirouette– petals flit like fouettés

over Covent Garden’s pebbled twilight.

A tiny swallow and White Crow,

dance their last somnambulant duet.

Through glittering prosceniums

and marble-arched halls,

he exits like a midnight wind,

born to a Trans-Siberian train.

Beneath chandeliers and cherubs,

they genuflect through showering roses,

to Weber’s romantic refrains—

a symphony of a shared love rises. *

*1. Rudolf Nureyev famously said: “We danced with one body, one soul” in his partnership with Margot Fonteyn.

*2. Le Spectre de la Rose, a dream-like, haunting ballet duet, was Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn’s last performance together, on June 23rd 1979. Margot Fonteyn – aged 60 – decided at the last moment to go back on stage that evening for the last time.

---

Leila Lois is a writer and dancer of Kurdish-Celtic origin based in Melbourne, Australia. She has poetry, essays and short stories published internationally for publications including LA Review of Books, Honey Literary Journal and Cordite. She is also published in several anthologies, most recently "Sleeping in the Courtyard: Kurdish Writers in Diaspora", edited by Holly Mason Badra and published by University of Arkansas Press.