I am starting a new category of poetry. Some will be ones that I like, others some that I have written. I am starting with these words of the Indian poet, Tagore, in a children’s book from a set of picture books I am now analyzing. The words are rather strange sounding, rather haunting.
Moon, for what do you wait?
The night opens the flower in secret, and allows the day to give thanks.
Thoughts pass in my mind like flocks of ducks in the sky. I hear the voice of their wings.
The night’s silence, like a deep lamp, is burning with the light of the Milky Way.
The hills are like shouts of children who raise their arms, trying to catch stars.
“Moon, for what do you wait?”
“To salute the sun, for whom I must make way.”
Night’s darkness is a bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn.
“I have lost my dewdrop,” cries the flower to the morning Sun who has lost all its stars.
“Are you too proud to kiss me?” the morning light asks the buttercup.
The trees come up to my window like the yearning of the dumb earth.
The bird-song is the echo of the morning light back from the earth.
The bird wishes it were a cloud, the Cloud wishes it were a bird.
Is not this mountain like a flower, with its petals of hills drinking the sunlight?
The cobweb pretends to catch dewdrops, and catches flies,
it is the tears of the earth that keeps her smiles in bloom.
Roots are the branches down in the earth. Branches are the roots in the air.
The infant flower opens its bud and cries, “Dear World, please do not fade.”
I sit at my window this morning where the world, like a passer-by, stops for a moment,
nods to me and goes. — by Rabindranath Tagore.
Doctor Grandma 