Poems
The tiniest sampling of inspired work.
The Poet's Complaint
The Banyan Tree
The Heart Of The Wood
The Lost Lady
The Crown Of Life
Dance, My Heart!
Meet the poets who wrote these verses
The Poet's Complaint
It's my grief that I am not a little white duck,
And I'd swim over the sea to France or to Spain;
I would not stay in Ireland for one week only,
To be without eating, without drinking, without a full jug.
Without a full jug, without eating, without drinking,
Without a feast to get, without wine, without meat,
Without high dances, without a big name, without music;
There is hunger on me, and I astray this long time.
It's my grief that I am not an old crow,
I would sit for awhile up on the old branch,
I could satisfy my hunger, and I not as I am
With a grain of oats or a white potato
It's my grief that I am not a red fox,
Leaping strong and swift on the mountains,
Eating cocks and hens without pity,
Taking ducks and geese as a conquerer.
It's my grief that I am not a bright salmon,
Going through the strong full water,
Catching the mayflies by my craft,
Swimming at my choice, and swimming with the stream
It's my grief that I am of the race of the poets;
It would be better for me to be a high rock,
Or a stone or a tree or an herb or a flower
Or anything at all but the thing that I am!
The Banyan Tree
By Ernest Lumsden
O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond,
have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have nested in your branches and left you?
Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at the tangle of your roots that plunged underground?
The women would come to fill their jars in the pond, and your huge black shadow would wriggle on the water like sleep struggling to wake up.
Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles weaving golden tapestry.
Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows, and the child would sit still and think.
He longed to be the wind and blow through your rustling branches,
to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water,
to be a bird and perch on your top-most twig,
and to float like those ducks among the weeds and shadows.
The Heart of the Wood
My hope and my love,
we will go for a while into the wood,
scattering the dew,
where we will see the trout,
we will see the blackbird on its nest;
the deer and the buck calling,
the little bird that is sweetest singing on the branches;
the cuckoo on the top of the fresh green;
and death will never come near us for ever in the sweet wood.
The Lost Lady
You are the drowned,
Star that I found
Washed on the rim of the sea
Before the morning.
You are the little dying light
That stopped me in the night
The Crown Of Life
I know not what Love is,--a memory
Of Heav'n once known,--a yearning for some goal
That shines afar,--a dream that doth control
The spirit, shadowing forth what is to be.
But this I know, my heart hath found in thee
The crown of life, the glory of the soul,
The healing of all strife, the making whole
Of my imperfect being,--yea, of me!
For to mine eyes thine eyes, through Love, reveal
The smile of God; to me God's healing breath
Comes through thy hallowed lips whose pray'r is Love.
Thy touch gives life! And oh, let me but feel
Thy hovering hand my closing eyes above,--
Then, then, my soul will triumph over Death
Dance, my heart! dance to-day with joy
The strains of love fill the days and the nights with music,
and the world is listening to its melodies:
Mad with joy, life and death dance to the rhythm of this music.
The hills and the sea and the earth dance.
The world of man dances in laughter and tears.
Why put on the robe of the monk,
and live apart from the world in lonely pride?
Behold! my heart dances in the delight of a hundred arts;
and the Creator is well pleased.
Meet The Poets
- The delightful lament in The Poet's Complaint is the work of Douglas Hyde, known in Ireland as An Craoibhin. His beautiful English lyrics are included in a translation of West Irish folksongs by Lady Augusta Gregory.
- The Banyan Tree is by India's poet, Tagore. The Spanish translation of his poems that won the Nobel Prize led to his meeting the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo. He was sixty-three, she was thirty-four. "I didn't know her language. Only her eyes spoke to me," he wrote.
- The Heart Of The Wood was included in the translations of folksongs published by Lady Augusta Gregory.
- The Lost Lady was written in Arabic by John Duncan, a Scotsman who left his homeland after an unhappy love affair to settle amongst nomad Arabs. He fell in love with an Arab girl whom he later married, and to whom all his poems are addressed. This one was published circa 1919.
- The Crown Of Life was a sonnet written in English by an Indian nobleman, Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur of Hyderabad. It was first published in book form in India in 1914.
- Dance, My Heart was written by the Indian mystic, Kabir, in the 15th century. He is believed to have been an orphan raised by Muslim weavers. But he became the disciple of a Hindu guru. His poetry urges worship by celebrating the joy of life. He had scathing comments for both the dominant religions of his day--Islam and Hinduism.
Contact
I'm available at frontender[AT]veeryani[DOT]com. Replace the brackets, and words in them, with the usual symbols.
- VEERYANI: universally usable Web sites
- Cost-effective * Colorful * Oh-so-easy-to-read
