Duino Elegies

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? And even if one were to suddenly
take me to its heart, I would vanish into its
stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but
the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,
and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry
of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world. Perhaps there remains
some tree on a slope, that we can see
again each day: there remains to us yesterday’s street,
and the thinned-out loyalty of a habit
that liked us, and so stayed, and never departed.
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of space
wears out our faces – whom would she not stay for,
the longed-for, gentle, disappointing one, whom the solitary heart
with difficulty stands before. Is she less heavy for lovers?
Ah, they only hide their fate between themselves.
Do you not know yet? Throw the emptiness out of your arms
to add to the spaces we breathe; maybe the birds
will feel the expansion of air, in more intimate flight.

Yes, the Spring-times needed you deeply. Many a star
must have been there for you so you might feel it. A wave
lifted towards you out of the past, or, as you walked
past an open window, a violin
gave of itself. All this was their mission.
But could you handle it? Were you not always,
still, distracted by expectation, as if all you experienced,
like a Beloved, came near to you? (Where could you contain her,
with all the vast strange thoughts in you
going in and out, and often staying the night.)

- Duino Elegies, The First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke

Lightly

A Pair of Leather Clogs by Vincent van Gogh

Lightly child, lightly. 
Learn to do everything lightly. 
Even though you're feeling deeply, 
lightly 
let things happen, and 
lightly 
cope with them on tiptoes 
and with no luggage, 
not even a sponge bag, 
completely 
unencumbered.
Lightly my darling...

- Aldous Huxley, Island 

What Survives

Blue III by Joan Miro

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,
but it dresses you again in gold
armor --from breast to knees--
and the battle was so pure
an angel wears it after you.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Koi paar nadi ke gata

bhang nishaa ki neeravta kar
(Breaking the silence of the night)
is dehaati gaane ka swar
(this rural/folk song's notes)
kakdi ke kheto se uthkar, aata jamuna par leharaata
(rising from cucumber's field, wish it came in waves on the river Jamuna)
koi paar nadi ke gaata
(wish someone sang across the river)

honge bhai bandhu nikat hi
(there could be relatives/friends nearby)
kabhi sochte honge ye bhi
(who may also be thinking sometimes)
is tat par bhi koi, uski tano se sukh pata
(somebody on this river bank may also seek solace / happiness from his song/raaga )
koi paar nadi ke gaata
(wish someone sang across the river)

aaj na jaane kyun hota mann
(Don't know why today this mind )
sun kar ye ekaaki gaayan
(after listening to the lonesome song)
sadaa ise main sunta rehta, sadaa ise ye gaata jaata
(always wants to listen to it, always wants to sing it)
koi paar nadi ke gaata
(wish someone sang across the river)

- Harivansh Rai Bachchan

Creation of a Pot

Rabindranath Tagore, Untitled (Striding Bird), 1928.

Within this earthen vessel are
bowers and groves, and with
it is the creator:
Within this vessel are the seven oceans
and the unnumbered stars.
The touchstone and the jewel
appraiser
are within;
and within is the eternal soundeth, and
the spring wells up
Kabi says: "Listen to me, my friend!
My beloved lord is within."

- Songs of Kabir, translated by Rabindranath Tagore

Sobremesa

Hesitantly, surrounded
by the mist that falls from days long gone,
we once more sit down to talk
and can't see each other.
Hesitantly, cut off in the depths of the mist.

On the table the breeze stirs slowly,
As we dream those who are absent draw close.
Leaves where bleak moss has passed long winters
now waken on the table-cloth.

Steam from the coffee cups drifts around us
and in the aroma we see old faces,
once more alive, float past
clouding the mirrors.

Empty chairs set straight
wait for those who, from far off,
will return later on.
We start talking
without seeing each other, without thought of time.

Hesitantly, in the mist
that grows and surrounds us,
we talk for hours without knowing
who is still alive and who is dead.

- Eugenio Montejo, Muerte y Memoria (1972), A Bright Moon For Fools

Another Sky

From Earth to Sky by Joan Miro

There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields -
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!

- Emily Dickinson

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Dream of a Politically Incorrect Artist by A. Ramchandran 

I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

- Langston Hughes

The flowering of the rod

Frida Kahlo (self portrait)

I go where I love and where I am loved,
into the snow;

I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity;

I go where I belong, inexorably,
as the rain that has lain long

in the furrow; I have given
or would have given

life to the grain;
but if it will not grow or ripen

with the rain of beauty,
the rain will return to the cloud;

the harvester sharpens his steel on the stone;
but this is not our field,

we have not sown this;
pitiless, pitiless, let us leave

The-place-of-a-skull
to those who have fashioned it.

-  The Flowering of the Rod, H.D.

What the living do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

- Marie Howe

Source: The Atlantic, Learn more at: NPR 

Now I Become Myself

Amrita Shergill at Bonhams

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

-  May Sarton ( Thanks Luzette!)

Marte hain aarzoo mein

Ahalya by A.Ramachandran 

koi umeed bar nahin aati

koi soorat nazar nahin aati

maut ka ek din mu'ayyan hai

neend kyun raat bhar nahi aati

aage aati thi haal-e-dil pe hasee

aab kisi baat par nahi aati

jaanta hoon sawaab-e-taa'at-o-zahad

par tabiyat idhar nahin aati

hai kuch aisee hi baat jo chup hoon

warna kya baat kar nahin aati?

kyon na cheekhon ki yaad karate hain

mere awaaz gar nahin aati

daag-e-dil gar nazar nahin aata

boo bhi aye chaaraagar! nahin aati

hum wahan hain jahaan se humko bhi

kuch humari khabar nahin aati

marte hain aarzoo mein marne ki

maut aati hai par nahin aati

kaaba'a kis munh se jaaoge 'ghalib'

sharm tumko magar nahin aati 

- Mirza Ghalib 

Ishq mastana

Rituals of lal dhaga by A. Ramachandran 

Haman hai ishq mastana,
Haman ko hoshiyari kya?
Rahe azad ya jag mein,
Haman duniya se yaari kya?

Jo bichude hain piyare se,
Bhatakte dar badar phirte,
Hamara yaar hai humme,
Haman ko intazaari kya?

Na pal bichude piya hum se,
Na hum bichude piyare se
Unhi se neh laga hai,
Haman ko bekarari kya?

Kabira ishq ka mata,
Dui ko dur kar dil se.
Jo chalna rah nazuk hai,
Haman sar bojh bhari kya?

- Kabir 

जब यार देखा नैन भर

Lány by Amrita Sher-Gil (1936)

जब यार देखा नैन भर दिल की गई चिंता उतर
ऐसा नहीं कोई अजब राखे उसे समझाए कर।

तू तो हमारा यार है, तुझ पर हमारा प्यार है
तुझे दोस्ती बिसियार है एक शब मिलो तुम आय कर।

खुसरो कहै बातें ग़ज़ब, दिल में न लावे कुछ अजब
कुदरत  खुदा की है अजब, जब जिव दिया गुल लाय कर।

- अमीर ख़ुसरौ 

Messenger

Sunflowers by Vincent Van Gogh 

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

- Mary Oliver (Thanks Margaux)

Ask nothing, refuse nothing

Whatever happens, whatever
What is is, is what
I want. Nothing else. But this.

- R.S. Thomas

The Double Realm

Only he who lifts his lyre
in the Underworld as well
may come back
to praising, endlessly.

Only he who has eaten
the food of the dead
will make music so clear
that even the softest tone is heard.

Though the reflection in the pool
often ripples away,
take the image within you.

Only in the double realm
do our voices carry
all they can say.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Birches

Birch Forest by Gustave Klimt 

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

- Robert Frost

Infinite

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety: other women cloy
The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies; for vilest things
Become themselves in her: that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

- From Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, 1606

Ishrat-e-qatra

- Mirza Ghalib 

Still

Singing lines by K.K. Hebbar 

At the still point of the turning world.
Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards;
at the still point, there the dance is…

- T.S.Eliot

Levels

Birth of poetry by K.K Hebbar 

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed. People may not notice at the time, but that doesn't matter. The world has been changed nonetheless.

- Levels of Life, Julian Barnes

A fairytale

As Spring Passes By by A.Ramachandran 

Alas, mountains of imagination were nothing but a house.
And this grand life of mine was nothing but an excuse.
You've been hearing my story so patiently for a lifetime.
Now hear this … It was nothing but a fairytale.

- Rumi

Leaning Into The Afternoons

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lengthens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that smell like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

- Pablo Neruda

Requiem of Mirrors & Flowers

"Tell me, must I travel ? Did you leave some Thing behind, some place, that cannot bear your absence? Must I set out for a country you never saw, although it was as vividly near to you as your own senses were ? I will sail its rivers, search its valleys, inquire about its oldest customs; I will stand for hours, talking with with women in their doorways and watching, while they call their children home. will see the way they wrap the land around them in their ancient work in field and meadow; will ask to be led before their king; will bribe the priests to take me to their temple, before the most powerful of the statues in their keeping, and to leave me there, shutting the gates behind them. And only then, when I have learned enough, I will go to watch the animals, and let something of their composure slowly glide into my limbs; will see my own existence deep in their eyes, which hold me for awhile and let me go, serenely, without judgment.

I will have the gardeners come to me and recite many flowers, and in their small melodious names I will bring back some remnant of the hundred fragrances. And fruits: I will buy fruits, and in their sweetness that country’s earth and sky will live, again. For that is what you understood: ripe fruits. You set them before the canvas, in white bowls, and weighed out each one’s heaviness with your colors. Women too, you saw, were fruits; and children, molded from inside, into the shapes of their existence. And at last you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped out of your clothes and brought your naked body before the mirror, you let yourself inside down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense, and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is. So free of curiosity your gaze had become, so unpossessive, of such true poverty, it had no desire even for yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.

And that is how I have cherished you -- deep inside the mirror, where you put yourself, far away from all the world. "

- From 'Requiem for a friend', Rainer Maria Rilke's

Love Song

Blue III by Joan Miro

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws *one* voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

Into the Twilight

Found by Neha

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,  
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;  
Laugh heart again in the gray twilight,  
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.  
  
Your mother Eire is always young,        
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood  
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

- W.B.Yeats, Into the Twilight, The Wind Among the Reeds

Ek na ek shamma

Ek na ek shamma andhere mein jalaye rakhiye

Subah hone ko hai maahawl sajaaye rakhiye

Jinke haathon se hume zakm-e-neha pahunchi hai

Wo bhee kehte hain ke zakhmon ko chupaaye rakhiye

Kaun jaane ke wo kis raah-guzar se guzre

Har guzar raah ko phoolon se sajaaye rakhiye

Daaman-e-yaar ki zeenat na bane har ansoo 

Apni palkon ke liye kuch to bachaaye rakhiye 

- From the album "Unforgettable" by Chitra Singh & Jagjit Singh

Listen on YouTube here. 

Poetry

Window by Henri Matisse

And it was at that age . . . poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, not silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.

I didn't know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind.
Something knocked in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first, faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing;
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire, and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.

And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss.
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.

-Pablo Neruda

And because Love battles

Resting Woman Wearing Tiara, 1936,
pen and ink drawing by Henri Matisse

And because love battles
not only in its burning agricultures
but also in the mouth of men and women,
I will finish off by taking the path away
to those who between my chest and your fragrance
want to interpose their obscure plant.

About me, nothing worse
they will tell you, my love,
than what I told you.

I lived in the prairies
before I got to know you
and I did not wait love but I was
laying in wait for and I jumped on the rose.

What more can they tell you?
I am neither good nor bad but a man,
and they will then associate the danger
of my life, which you know
and which with your passion you shared.

And good, this danger
is danger of love, of complete love
for all life,
for all lives,
and if this love brings us
the death and the prisons,
I am sure that your big eyes,
as when I kiss them,
will then close with pride,
into double pride, love,
with your pride and my pride.

But to my ears they will come before
to wear down the tour
of the sweet and hard love which binds us,
and they will say: “The one
you love,
is not a woman for you,
Why do you love her? I think
you could find one more beautiful,
more serious, more deep,
more other, you understand me, look how she’s light,
and what a head she has,
and look at how she dresses,
and etcetera and etcetera”.

And I in these lines say:
Like this I want you, love,
love, Like this I love you,
as you dress
and how your hair lifts up
and how your mouth smiles,
light as the water
of the spring upon the pure stones,
Like this I love you, beloved.

To bread I do not ask to teach me
but only not to lack during every day of life.
I don’t know anything about light, from where
it comes nor where it goes,
I only want the light to light up,
I do not ask to the night
explanations,
I wait for it and it envelops me,
And so you, bread and light
And shadow are.

You came to my life
with what you were bringing,
made
of light and bread and shadow I expected you,
and Like this I need you,
Like this I love you,
and to those who want to hear tomorrow
that which I will not tell them, let them read it here,
and let them back off today because it is early
for these arguments.

Tomorrow we will only give them
a leaf of the tree of our love, a leaf
which will fall on the earth
like if it had been made by our lips
like a kiss which falls
from our invincible heights
to show the fire and the tenderness
of a true love.

- Pablo Neruda

Always

Self Portrait by Amrita Sher-Gil 

I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth,
to start our life!

- Pablo Neruda

One Art

Hill Women by Amrita Shergil

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

- Elizabeth Bishop

Through love

Gopini by Jamini Roy

In the West intellect is the source of life,
In the East love is the basis of life.
Through love intellect gets acquainted with reality
And intellect gives stability to the work of love.
Arise and lay the foundations of a new world
By wedding intellect to love.

-Iqbal

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