Poems From:

Rabindranath Tagore: Final Poems

(translations, with Saranindranath Tagore)

 

SICKBED 7

Deep night-interior,

beneath the patient’s clouded sight,

when I see

your wakened presence,

the sky’s uncounted planet-suns

in limitless time

greet my mortality.

After, when I know

you will go,

terror swells

from the apathy of the world’s vast silence.

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November 12, 1940 (night)

(First appeared in The Kenyon Review and Stand)

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SICKBED 39

When I don’t see you, pain weaves

a world under me that whispers

your leaving.

Panicked, I try to seize an emptying sky

with stretched hands.

The dream breaks.

And there you are, knitting,

beside me—

bending to the calm of creation.

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December 5, 1940 (morning)

(First appeared in The New Renaissance)

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RECOVERY 9

In the space of vast creation:

play of fireworks sky across sky,

with suns and stars

from age to the end of age.

I too have come from the beginningless invisible

with a tiny dot at the end of the spark

to this corner, this little place, this bit of time.

As I have arrived at this act of departure

the flame of the lamp fades.

In the shadow, the maya-form of this play,

happiness, sadness, these theatrical clothes

fall slowly away.

I see ages through ages, the hundreds upon hundreds of players

discarding their colored garments

outside the doors of the playhouse.

I see

beyond the hundreds upon hundreds of extinguished stars

the Dancing Lord, alone, silent.

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February 3, 1941 (evening)

(First appeared in The Literary Review)