Allspirit

Category: Joy

  • Your Touch is Unhinging

    Steve Toth

    Your touch is unhinging
    Your eyes express such joy
    it makes me forget there’s nothing to fear
    The starling flock in my heart is now aflutter
    How can you still be dealing me hands
    when you’ve already cleaned me out?
    You’ve even got me seeing the strangeness
    right here in the living room
    since you altered my vision with a look

    What chance does a solitary star have
    against a whole sky full of darkness?
    A pretty good one if it’s the sun you are
    & this is your solar system
    Plug me into your power source
    Where thoughts go energy follows
    Shattered things don’t just go back
    the way they were do they?
    Listen while I crash my waves for you

    Why didn’t I know there would be such discoveries?
    Come let me dig you further
    How can I always be in your presence?
    You cleared a way when you told me:
    “If it wasn’t for this wall
    we wouldn’t be needing a window
    & if not for this window
    I wouldn’t be drawing these curtains aside”
    Then you opened me for good

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  • Unending Love

    By Rabindranath Tagore

    I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
    In life after life, in age after age, forever.
    My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
    That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
    In life after life, in age after age, forever.

    Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age old pain,
    It’s ancient tale of being apart or together.
    As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
    Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
    You become an image of what is remembered forever.

    You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
    At the heart of time, love of one for another.
    We have played along side millions of lovers,
    Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
    the distressful tears of farewell,
    Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

    Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
    The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
    Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
    The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
    And the songs of every poet past and forever.
    From Selected Poems, Translated by William Radice

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  • I wonder if I know him

    By Rabindranath Tagore

    I wonder if I know him
    In whose speech is my voice,
    In whose movement is my being,
    Whose skill is in my lines,
    Whose melody is in my songs
    In joy and sorrow.
    I thought he was chained within me,
    Contained by tears and laughter,
    Work and play.
    I thought he was my very self
    Coming to an end with my death.
    Why then in a flood of joy do I feel him
    In the sight and touch of my beloved?
    This ‘I’ beyond self I found
    On the shores of the shining sea.
    Therefore I know
    This ‘I’ is not imprisoned within my bounds.
    Losing myself, I find him
    Beyond the borders of time and space.
    Through the Ages
    I come to know his Shining Self
    In the life of the seeker,
    In the voice of the poet.
    From the dark clouds pour the rains.
    I sit and think:
    Bearing so many forms, so many names,
    I come down, crossing the threshold
    Of countless births and deaths.
    The Supreme undivided, complete in himself,
    Embracing past and present,
    Dwells in Man.
    Within Him I shall find myself –
    The ‘I’ that reaches everywhere.

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  • Petals

    By Rumi

    Even when you tear its petals off one after another,
    the rose keeps laughing and doesn’t bend in pain.
    “Why should I be afflicted because of a thorn?
    It is the thorn which taught me how to laugh.”
    Whatever you lost through fate,
    be certain that it saved you from pain.
    A Sheikh was asked: “What is Sufism?”
    He said: “To feel joy in the heart when sorrow appears.”

    From: Breathing Truth Translated by Muriel Maufroy

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