By Bakul Banerjee
The charm of the crucial beat, the indispensable rhythm captured in a poem by Bakul Banerjee.
dhinak natin tina
baja re mon bina
~ From a Bengali Folksong
In sync with the complex beat
he dances, revving up the heat
His red flamenco shoes spin
romance as castanets sing
with drums weaving patterns
Women wait by the wing for turns
The strong man fans his purple vest
casts his gossamer web to test
his complex Flamenco rhythm.
He and dancers before him
are nothing but slaves to slices
of time coded by ancients
Rhythms live by the agents
of counted intervals and repeats
with continuous connected beats.
When this connection breaks,
like life and love, this dance,
this magical dance, also ends.
An award winning author and poet Bakul Banerjee published her first volume of poems, titled “Synchronicity: Poems” in 2010. For the past fifteen years, her poems and stories appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies throughout U.S. and India. She lives near Chicago and received her Ph.D. degree in computational geophysics from The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland.