Just thought I would share a couple of poems with you tonight. Mystics are poets because they know the words are useless when it comes to attempting to describe the divine…

Here are two poems floating through my mind. The first is a famous poem by Rabindranath Tagore the great Indian poet and Nobel Laureate, in his collection of poems titled ‘Gitanjali’ — translated, “Song offerings to God”. The second is “free form verse….no editing. it is just going to flow” from my friend Niles Comer, offering warmth and light on a cold, dark day.

==

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.

— Rabindranath Tagore

==

“Mama is burning”

Mumbai is burning…
and so is the soft ivory candle, resting gently
(for those who have no rest now) in the Japanese
candelabra,
under the aging wooden icon of Messiah.

He burns too…

Mumbai…goddess. Mama, burning with passion
for freedom, the whys the whats the holy incense
now incensed.

Scattered thoughts…scattered flesh,
the earth once again is bleeding and God
has let us fools bloodlet again, thinking still
that shedding ‘bad’ blood will somehow heal our
ever-picked wounds…

Mumbai is burning
and the children have had their innocence
shattered in the shell shock from the
pained confusion of those who think that
right is right…wrong.

I am bleeding on the streets of mumbai,
my tears painting all the souls in mercy…

mercy…mercy…burning bright….

still.

— Niles Comer

niles@paintedsoul.org