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