eddy

 

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The birth and death of the leaves are the rapid whirls of the eddy whose wider circles move slowly among stars.

–Rabindranath Tagore

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largerloves
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the gardener 85

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Who are you, reader, reading my poems an 
hundred years hence? 

I cannot send you one single flower from this 
wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold 
from yonder clouds. 
 
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant 
memories of the vanished flowers of an 
hundred years before.
 
In the joy of your heart may you feel the 
living joy that sang one spring morning, 
sending its glad voice across a 
hundred years.


–Rabindranath Tagore 

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Are You a Mere Picture?

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Are you a mere picture, and not as true as those stars, true as
this dust? They throb with the pulse of things, but you are
immensely aloof in your stillness, painted form. 

The day was when you walked with me, your breath warm, your
limbs singing of life. My world found its speech in your voice, and
touched my heart with your face. You suddenly stopped in your walk,
in the shadow-side of the Forever, and I went on alone.

Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it
runs; it beckons me on, I follow the unseen; but you stand there,
where you stopped behind that dust and those stars; and you are a
mere picture.

No, it cannot be. Had the life-flood utterly stopped in you,
it would stop the river in its flow, and the foot-fall of dawn in
her cadence of colours. Had the glimmering dusk of your hair
vanished in the hopeless dark, the woodland shade of summer would
die with its dreams.

Can it be true that I forgot you? We haste on without heed, forgetting the flowers on the roadside hedge. Yet they breathe unaware into our forgetfulness, filling it with music. You have moved from my world, to take seat at the root of my life, and therefore is this forgetting-remembrance lost in its own depth.

You are no longer before my songs, but one with them. You came
to me with the first ray of dawn. I lost you with the last gold of
evening. Ever since I am always finding you through the dark. No,
you are no mere picture.


–Rabindranath Tagore
Lover’s Gifts XLII

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