Eleven short lines hold a whole span of human history. Mary F. C. Pratt's "Street Dance" begins with what sounds like a scientific claim and ends in a crowd of people having fun. Its central idea is that we are less far from our distant ancestors than we like to think, and that dancing is the proof. Nobody has to teach us to move together, because the knowledge seems older than any lesson.
The opening is blunt. "We have not come so far; / we are so close to home" can be read two ways. "Home" might mean our origins, the place the species started, or it might carry the comfort the word usually has. The poem never settles it, and that ambiguity gives it a quiet tension. The next image is the sharpest: "our brains—those soft machines— / still live in caves of bones." Here the skull becomes a cave. "Soft machines" pulls two opposites together, since a machine is hard, designed and exact, and the brain is wet, fragile and organic. The phrase also gets at what the poem is saying about us. We are clever enough to call ourselves machines, yet we remain soft, animal things sheltering in bone. The dashes on either side of the phrase set it apart, as if the speaker is pausing to admire the idea.
Then comes the strangest line: "There are bears among the stones." It is plain, flat and a little ominous, and it sounds almost like a folk warning. The bears are never explained. Judging by the imagery, they stand for the old wildness and danger that the poem suggests still lurk beneath modern life. The "stones" push the same way. They suggest the floor of a cave, but a reader who has the title in mind may also hear paving stones, the surface of a street. The primitive and the urban overlap, and the poem lets the two pictures sit on top of each other.
After that the poem changes pace. The first five lines are tight and aphoristic, with the second half of that stretch ending in the near-rhyme of "bones" and "stones" (and "home" echoing the same long vowel). The sixth line, "Everyone knows how to dance—", opens into a loose catalogue of figures: the woman "twirling in her short skirt," the partner "in his green shirt," "those flirting girls," "old people and their little dogs," and "the children in their wild cavort." Lines grow longer and the sentence tumbles forward, which mimics a crowd spilling into the street. The sound pattern tightens as it goes. "Skirt" and "shirt" make a bright, almost comic rhyme, and "cavort" at the very end echoes "short" from three lines earlier, so the poem closes by quietly returning to a sound it has already used. The last line also has no full stop. The dance is not finished.
The list itself is carefully chosen. It covers courtship (the twirling woman, the flirting girls), old age, and childhood, so the whole span of a human life shares one street. Small concrete details such as the green shirt and the little dogs keep the scene from becoming a lecture. The dogs may be worth a second look. Reading with the "bears" in mind, they could be seen as the tamed descendants of wilder animals, brought along into the modern crowd. That is an inference, but it fits the poem's habit of letting the ancient show through the ordinary.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it turns an unsettling thought into something close to celebration. "We have not come so far" could be a lament, a warning that civilisation is thin. But the evidence the poem offers is joyful: the "wild cavort" of children is exactly the instinct the bears represent, and it is welcome. The wildness in us does not have to be feared, and a street dance is a safe, communal place to let it out. In very few words, the poem makes the caveman in the skull and the person in the green shirt seem like one and the same.