"The Gift"
If you would have it so,
I will end my singing.
If it sets your heart aflutter,
I will take away my eyes from your face.
If it suddenly startles you in your walk,
I will step aside and take another path.
If it confuses you in your flower-weaving,
I will shun your lonely garden.
If it makes the water wanton and wild,
I will not row my boat by your bank.
"In the Dusky Path of a Dream"
In the dusky path of a dream I went to seek the love who was mine
in a former life.
Her house stood at the end of a desolate street.
In the evening breeze her pet peacock sat drowsing on its perch,
and the pigeons were silent in their corner.
She set her lamp down by the portal and stood before me.
She raised her large eyes to my face and mutely asked, "Are you
well, my friend?"
I tried to answer, but our language had been lost and forgotten.
I thought and thought; our names would not come to my mind.
Tears shone in her eyes. She held up her right hand to me. I
took it and stood silent.
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze and died.
I stopped by the British Museum this evening to see the small but stunning exhibit of Rabindranath Tagore paintings. In some ways, these small paintings are just doodles, but the deep layers of color are masterful and bring the abstract animals to life against a background of sorrow mingled with hope. These are a few of his many poems. I hadn't known that he had done any painting.
"Mind Without Fear"
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up
into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason
has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action---
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
