Joy

Your Touch is Unhinging

Gill Washington Joy, Poems, Spirituality, Steve Toth , , , , 0 Comment

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

Gill Washington Joy, Life, Love, Poems, Rabindranath Tagore, Sorrow, Spirituality , , , , 1 Comment

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

Gill Washington Death, Joy, Life, Poems, Rabindranath Tagore, Sorrow, Spirituality , , , 0 Comment

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

Gill Washington Joy, Poems, Rumi, Spirituality, Sufism , , 0 Comment

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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