Feb.25.2007
Tribute to Tagore
I have become my own version of an optimist.
If I can’t make it through one door,
I’ll go through another door - or I’ll make a door.
Something terrific will come no matter how dark the present.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy.
I awoke and saw that life was service.
I acted and behold, service was joy.
Life is perpetually creative because
it contains in itself that surplus which
ever overflows the boundaries
of the immediate time and space,
restlessly pursuing its adventure of expression
in the varied forms of self-realization.
In Art, one reveals oneself and not one’s objects.
One’s cry is to reach one’s fullest expression.
Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it.
Life, like a child, laughs,
shaking its rattle of death as it runs.
Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.
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.