Shiva’s Dancing

by Thomas Davis

Ben Naga published a short poem on his blog, https://bennaga.wordpress.com:

SHIVA’S DANCING

Inhale thyme, the spice of life
Dance the music of rhythm
A tapestry woven through
Time and space in harmony

I responded with free verse:

And inside Orion, where gas the size of planets spit
out of a black hole’s enormous yaw,
and where incubators blaze suns out of what seems light,
but is really reactors coalescing into the splitting of nuclei,

Shiva went walking.

As he walked he felt, rather than saw, the forces of destruction
annihilating into the forces of creation,
and the foment caused by his walking and his thoughts
inside a place generating the growth of a galaxy
let him sit on the side of a mountain in the Himalayas
as a snow leopard and two spotted cubs
leapt from a ledge of old ice
toward a cliff face where mountain goats danced with dark hooves away
into clouds descended from heaven.

Ben Naga responded to that by saying, I like the poem. So full of powerful imagery. Should I challenge you to tame this outpouring into a sonnet?

I responded:

Shiva’s Dancing

Gas from a black hole’s yaw hurled massively
To deep, deep space. In Orion suns blazed
Out from the incubator galaxy,
New stars a coalescing plasma raised
From clouds of light as Shiva walked
In nothingness and felt unraveling
Annihilate into creation as he stalked
Through dances of light’s christening.

Upon a Himalayan mountaintop
He sat. Snow leopards, muscling with grace,
Leapt from a ledge of ice, the yawing drop
Below them sheer, a cliff’s dark, rocky face.

Two mountain goats danced, dark with hooves, away
Into a cloudy heaven’s roiled ballet.

One thing links to another, then causes a reaction that has, somehow, the definition of creativity inside it.