The Dancer
August 4 2025
by Mark Kikot
As the stillness
of his will’s creative focus
gathers strength,
a shamanistic magic quivers
through his limbs.
With buoyant silken breath,
they stir
and stretch out time,
then stepping
glide into the grace of formlessness.
The presence he is seeking
moves towards the water’s edge
and casts a double image:
man becoming bird.
As he draws in the spirit
of another pulse,
his feathered flesh unfolds
a white and gray
and black-tipped wing.
And now the crane
begins to mime the man,
the motions
which the human body makes
to charge the world
with life.
A living tapestry,
the ritual goes round and round
until the dancer pauses
in one final brushstroke lifts an arm like neck
and tilts a hand-poised head.
A preening beauty
conscious only of itself,
its breathless rhythmic heart.
June 6, 2020