Poem: The Dance of the Human Experience
Sarah Polyakov had thrown a challenge on how to name the title of her recent artwork. Here I quote her.
‘The tango is truly the dance of the human experience. And so these dancers are never far from my mind and my hands. My friends, who has a title for my most recent piece?’
It did not take a wink to adopt her words as the title. ‘The Dance of the Human Experience’. We all know it takes two to tango. For her breathtaking artwork, there was a missing piece — just a garland of verses. Here is my poem, inspired by her artwork ‘The Dance of the Human Experience.’
Poem: The Dance of the Human Experience (aka Tango)
What is called the human experience?
Which combines introspection with imagination
That makes a cocktail of all emotions twenty-seven
Brings the nether-world and earth to impossible heaven.
How to create those moments that make up the eternity
Or how to break eternity into those little fragments of time.
How to be in a world of my own, locked up and lost
Yet be with somebody, the companion for my wandering soul.
If I were to tell you that I found my human experience
The answers to all my questions — in that beautiful dance
Hard to believe yet easy to imagine, my wisdom enhanced
Sunk in silence, tiptoeing and twisting into a soulful trance
Hand in hand and step with step, I danced with you
Our tangled souls flying in tandem, up in the vast sky blue
The twists and turns, the throwbacks and pivots
The open step, the front, and the back cross
We flip into a graceful arch, like the seven-colored rainbow
An experience within and without, a performance of not-tell-but-show.
For emotions that I have conquered and for those I have yearned
A world that I have won, yet there were things that I learned,
An exploration of time and space, and the questions of why, when, and how,
Traveling to the past and flying into the future, yet present here and now
I am the master and I am the student,
The painter of invisible arcs and emotions silent
A life full of learning and exploration in every sense
Tango with you, is the ultimate human experience.
~Ashok Subramanian © 2022
