The beat
The ti-ti-ta of drum practice reverberates through
the floor. The boy
downstairs is swinging percussion
to the beat of his own improv, sending soundwaves
in sonorous pattern to his heart’s tempo and soul’s
cadence. Does he feel his changing rhythms take up
partners with the dancing atoms, swaying in time with
the animate universe, and bending space-time
by planck-lengths?
Does he sense his breath’s harmony with the random
breeze; underpinned by mathematics more precise than
Tchaikovsky in fractal iterations found from spiral shells
to wheeling galaxies thrumming?
And does he know he is in concert with all his human
kin, who search out patterns, require symmetry and seek
order to express the arrangement of their own dna, still
dancing with the atoms replicating patterns in primordial
mitochondria and singing with the chorus of the stars?
Kerry Miller
