Footfalls

Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

- T S Eliot

Phule Phule Dhole Dhole

Phule phule dhole dhole,
Bohey kibaa mridu baay.
Totini hillolo tuley,
Kollole choliya jaay.
Piko kibaa kunje kunje,
Piko kibaa kunje kunje,
Kuhu kuhu kuhu gaay.
Ki jaani kishero laagi,
Praano kore haay-haay.

A touch of sweetness in the breeze that

Softly cradles buds today

A winding stream that gently gurgles

In its happy course at play

The cuckoo sings in trees and gardens

a cuhoo cuhoo cuhoo lay

My absent heart does not know why

It's absolutely borne away

- Rabindranath Tagore, Featured in Satyajit Ray's Charulata 

I love these versions: 

# 1. From Satyajit Ray's 1964 movie "Charulata" based on Rabindranath Tagore's Novel "Nastanirh" 

# 2. This back to back amalgamation with a Scottish song by Robert Burns

# 3. This traditional Rabindra Sangeet version
# 4. This Parineeta song which is inspired by and based on the same tune

Outcast

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity's long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

-  The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Oscar Wilde

Life is a dream

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?  by Paul Gauguin

What is this life? A frenzy.
What is this life? An illusion,
A shadow, a fiction,
And the greatest good is small;
All of life is but a dream,
And dreams are only dreams.

- Life is a dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca

A Knowing

Filled by Neha

“Why is it," he said, one time, at the subway entrance, "I feel I've known you so many years?"
"Because I like you," she said, "and I don't want anything from you.”

― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Half Asleep

Arearea no varua ino by Paul Gauguin 

She tells her love while half asleep,
       In the dark hours,
               With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
       And puts out grass and flowers
                Despite the snow,
                Despite the falling snow.

- Robert Graves

Red, red rose

The Red Madras Headress by Matisse 

O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That’s sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare thee well, my only Luve
And fare thee well, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.

- Robert Burns

The Garden of Proserpina

Since riddles are the order of our day
Come here, my love, and I will tell thee one

There is a place to which all poets come
Some having sought it long, some unawares,
Some having battled monsters, some asleep
Who chances upon the path in thickest dream,
Some lost in mythy mazes, some direct....

..These things are there. The garden and the tree
The serpent at its root, the fruit of gold
The woman in the shadow of the boughs
The running water and the grassy space.

They are and were there. At the old world's rim,
In the Hesperidean grove, the fruit
Glowed golden on enternal boughs, and there
The dragon Ladon crisped his jewelled crest
Scraped a gold claw and sharped a silver tooth
And dozed and waiting through eternity
Until the tricksy hero Herakles
Came to his dispossesion and the theft....

...All these are true and gone. The place is there.
Is what we name it, and is not. It is. 

 Randolph Henry Ash,  The Garden of Proserpina, Possession by A.S.Byatt

तमाम उम्र

सफ़र by Neha

तमाम उम्र मैं इक अजनबी के घर में रहा ।
सफ़र न करते हुए भी किसी सफ़र में रहा ।

वो जिस्म ही था जो भटका किया ज़माने में,
हृदय तो मेरा हमेशा तेरी डगर में रहा ।

तू ढूँढ़ता था जिसे जा के बृज के गोकुल में,
वो श्याम तो किसी मीरा की चश्मे-तर में रहा ।

वो और ही थे जिन्हें थी ख़बर सितारों की,
मेरा ये देश तो रोटी की ही ख़बर में रहा ।

हज़ारों रत्न थे उस जौहरी की झोली में,
उसे कुछ भी न मिला जो अगर-मगर में रहा ।

-गोपालदास "नीरज"

क्या है यह तूफ़ान

High Flight

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth of sun-split clouds
- and done a hundred things you have not dreamed of -
wheeled and soared and swung high in the sunlit silence.
Hovering there I've chased the shouting wind along
and flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
where never lark, or even eagle, flew;
and, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
the high untrespassed sanctity of space,
put out my hand and touched the face of God.

- John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.

- William Ernest Henley

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Oshun by Neha

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

- Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977

मधुशाला

प्यास तुझे तो, विश्व तपाकर पूणर् निकालूँगा हाला
एक पाँव से साकी बनकर नाचूँगा लेकर प्याला
जीवन की मधुता तो तेरे ऊपर कब का वार चुका
आज निछावर कर दूँगा मैं, तुझपर जग की मधुशाला॥२॥

चलने ही चलने में कितना जीवन, हाय, बिता डाला!
' दूर अभी है ' , पर, कहता है हर पथ बतलानेवाला
हिम्मत है न बढ़ूँ आगे, साहस है न फ़िरूँ पीछे
किंकतर्व्यविमूढ़ मुझे कर दूर खड़ी है मधुशाला॥५॥

मुख से तू अविरत कहता जा मधु, मदिरा, मादक हाला
हाथों में अनुभव करता जा एक ललित कल्पित प्याला
ध्यान किए जा मन में सुमधुर सुखकर, सुंदर साकी का
और बढ़ा चल, पथिक, न तुझको दूर लगेगी मधुशाला॥६॥

- हरिवंश राय बच्चन 

Blue Remembered Hills

Our Blue by Neha

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

- A. E. Housman

Dream to dream

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue… Temperament is the iron wire on which the beads are strung.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson quotes in General Theory of Love

Partly brave and partly good

Roots by Frida Kahlo

"To have in this uncertain world some stay
which cannot be undermined, is
of the utmost consequence."
                                         Thus wrote 
a woman, partly brave and partly good, 
who fought with what she partly understood.
Few men about her would or could do more, 
hence she was labeled harpy, shrew, and whore.

- Adrienne Rich, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Golden Hours

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by.

 - James M. Barrie, novelist and playwright 

Tertium non data

"The alchemists have a saying, "Tertium non data': the third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matters into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious. No one really knows what effects the change. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a vast plain without any movement at all. We can only guess what happened"

- From Fortunata's Story, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

To You

Wild Pink For You by Neha

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,
I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands,
Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners,
troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,
Your true soul and body appear before me.
They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work,
farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking,
suffering, dying.
Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,
I whisper with my lips close to your ear.
I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,
I should have made my way straight to you long ago,
I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing
but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,
None has understood you, but I understand you,
None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself,
None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,
None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent
to subordinate you,
I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God,
beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,
From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color'd light,
But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus
of gold-color'd light,
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams,
effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!
You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself
all your life,
Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,
What you have done returns already in mockeries,
(Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in
mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you,
Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,
I pursue you where none else has pursued you,
Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the
accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from
yourself, they do not conceal you from me,
The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these
balk others they do not balk me,
The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed,
premature death, all these I part aside.

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,
There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,
No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,
No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully
to you,
I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing
the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard!
These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you,
These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense
and interminable as they,
These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent
dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,
Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain,
passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,
Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest,
whatever you are promulges itself,
Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing
is scanted,
Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are
picks its way.

- Walt Whitman

Many songs

In one of his notebooks, Chekhov jotted down an allegory borrowed from Alphonse Daudet: "Why are your songs so short?" the bird was once asked. "Haven't you got enough breaths?"--"I have many songs", replied the bird, "and I would like the world to hear them all."

Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond

Boats at Saintes Maries by Vincent Van Gogh

somewhere I have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which I cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though I have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, I and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(I do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

- e e cummings

Contradiction

The past and present wilt—I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

- Walt Whitman: Song of Myself, Part 51

My father moved through dooms of love

my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

this motionless forgetful where
turned at his glance to shining here;
that if(so timid air is firm)
under his eyes would stir and squirm

newly as from unburied which
floats the first who,his april touch
drove sleeping selves to swarm their fates
woke dreamers to their ghostly roots

and should some why completely weep
my father's fingers brought her sleep:
vainly no smallest voice might cry
for he could feel the mountains grow.

Lifting the valleys of the sea
my father moved through griefs of joy;
praising a forehead he called the moon
singing desire into begin

joy was his song and joy so pure
a heart of star by him could steer
and pure so now and now so yes
the wrists of twilight would rejoice

keen as midsummer's keen beyond
conceiving mind of sun will stand,
so strictly(over utmost him
so hugely)stood my father's dream

his flesh was flesh his blood was blood:
no hungry man but wished him food;
no cripple wouldn't creep one mile
uphill to only see him smile.

Scorning the pomp of must and shall
my father moved through dooms of feel;
his anger was as right as rain
his pity was as green as grain

septembering arms of year extend
less humbly wealth to foe and friend
than he to foolish and to wise
offered immeasurable is

proudly and(by octobering flame
beckoned)as earth will downward climb,
so naked for immortal work
his shoulders marched against the dark

his sorrow was as true as bread:
no liar looked him in the head;
if every friend became his foe
he'd laugh and build a world with snow.

My father moved through theys of we,
singing each new leaf out of each tree
(and every child was sure that spring
danced when she heard my father sing)

then let men kill which cannot share,
let blood and flesh be mud and mire,
scheming imagine,passion willed,
freedom a drug that's bought and sold

giving to steal and cruel kind,
a heart to fear,to doubt a mind,
to differ a disease of same,
conform the pinnacle of am

though dull were all we taste as bright,
bitter all utterly things sweet,
maggoty minus and dumb death
all we inherit,all bequeath

and nothing quite so least as truth
—i say though hate were why man breathe—
because my father lived his soul
love is the whole and more than all

- e e cummings 

Heart of Matter

What is straight? A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.

-  Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire

The Ninth Elegy (excerpt)

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) --: why then
have to be human - and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? ....

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss,
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too....

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which is in some strange way keeps calling to us.
Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once.  And never again.  But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Gravel

It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.

Everywhere we look:
the sweet guttural swill of the water
tumbling.
Everywhere we look:
the stone, basking in the sun,

or offering itself
to the golden lichen.

It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful

but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,

frenzied,
wringing our hands,

half-mad, saying over and over:

what does it mean, that the world is beautiful—
what does it mean?

The child asks this,
and the determined, laboring adult asks this—

both the carpenter and the scholar ask this,
and the fisherman and the teacher;

both the rich and the poor ask this
(maybe the poor more than the rich)

and the old and the very old, not yet having figured it out,
 ask this
desperately

standing beside the golden-coated field rock,
or the tumbling water,
or under the stars—

what does it mean?
what does it mean?

- From "Gravel" by Mary Oliver

Food for thought

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become the path himself.

I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposelessness, infinitude.

From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware there is no goal. … With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as man.

- Henry Miller

On Love

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.

- Adrienne Rich

812

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period —

When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields

That Science cannot overtake

But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope you know

It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step

Or Noons report away

Without the Formula of sound

It passes and we stay —

A quality of loss

Affecting our Content

As Trade had suddenly encroached

Upon a Sacrament.

- Emily Dickinson