2 – Lyrical Poems – Sri Aurobindo

JIVANMUKTA

There is a silence greater than any known
To earth’s dumb spirit, motionless in the soul
That has become Eternity’s foothold,
Touched by the infinitudes for ever.

A Splendour is here, refused to the earthward sight,
That floods some deep flame-covered all-seeing eye;
Revealed it wakens when God’s stillness
Heavens the ocean of moveless Nature.

A Power descends no Fate can perturb or vanquish,
Calmer than mountains, wider than marching waters,
A single might of luminous quiet
Tirelessly bearing the worlds and ages.

A bliss surrounds with ecstasy everlasting,
An absolute high-seated immortal rapture……….

He who from Time’s dull motion escapes and thrills
Rapt thoughtless, wordless into the Eternal’s breast,
Unrolls the form and sign of being,
Seated above in the omniscient Silence.

Although consenting here to a mortal body,
He is the Undying; limit and bond he knows not;
For him the aeons are a playground,
Life and its deeds are his splendid shadow.

Only to bring God’s forces to waiting Nature,

To help with wide-winged Peace her tormented labour
And heal with joy her ancient sorrow,
Casting down light on the inconscient darkness,

He acts and lives. Vain things are mind’s smaller motives
To one whose soul enjoys for its high possession
Infinity and the sempiternal
All is his guide and beloved and refuge.

SHIVA

The Inconscient Creator

A face on the cold dire mountain peaks
Grand and still; its lines white and austere
Match with the unmeasured snowy streaks
Cutting heaven, implacable and sheer.

Above it a mountain of matted hair
Aeon-coiled on that deathless and lone head

In its solitude huge of lifeless air
Round, above illimitably spread.
A moon-ray on the forehead, blue and pale,
Stretched afar its finger of chill light
Illumining emptiness. Stern and male
Mask of peace indifferent in might!

But out from some Infinite born now came
Over giant snows and the still face
A quiver and colour of crimson flame,
Fire-point in immensities of space.
Light-spear-tips revealed the mighty shape,
Tore the secret veil of the heart’s hold;
In that diamond heart the fires undrape,
Living core, a brazier of gold.
This was the closed mute and burning source
Whence were formed the worlds and their star-dance;
Life sprang, a self-rapt inconscient Force,Love, a blazing seed, from that flame-trance.

OCEAN ONENESS

Silence is round me, wideness ineffable;
White birds on the ocean diving and wandering;
A soundless sea on a voiceless heaven,
Azure on azure, is mutely gazing.

      Identified with silence and boundlessness
          My spirit widens clasping the universe
        Till all that seemed becomes the Real,
             One in a mighty and single vastness.

Someone broods there nameless and bodiless,
Conscious and lonely, deathless and infinite,
And, sole in a still eternal rapture,
Gathers all things to his heart for ever.

SOUL IN THE IGNORANCE

DESCENT

All my cells thrill swept by a surge of splendour,
Soul and body stir with a mighty rapture,
Light and still more light like an ocean billows
            Over me, round me.

Rigid, stonelike, fixed like a hill or statue,
Vast my body feels and upbears the world’s weight;
Dire the large descent of the Godhead enters
            Limbs that are mortal.

Voiceless, thronged, Infinity crowds upon me;
Presses down a glory of power eternal;
Mind and heart grow one with the cosmic wideness;
            Stilled are earth’s murmurs.

Swiftly, swiftly crossing the golden spaces
Knowledge leaps, a torrent of rapid lightnings;
Thoughts that left the Ineffable’s flaming mansions,
            Blaze in my spirit.

Slow the heart-beats’ rhythm like a giant hammer’s;
Missioned voices drive to me from God’s doorway
Words that live not save upon Nature’s summits,
            Ecstasy’s chariots.

All the world is changed to a single oneness;
Souls undying, infinite forces, meeting,
Join in God-dance weaving a seamless Nature,
Rhythm of the Deathless.

Mind and heart and body, one harp of being,
Cry that anthem, finding the notes eternal,—
Light and might and bliss and immortal wisdom
            Clasping for ever.

1 – Lyrical Poems – Sri Aurobindo

MUSA SPIRITUS

THE MOTHER OF GOD

A conscious and eternal Power is here
Behind unhappiness and mortal birth
And the error of Thought and blundering trudge of Time.
The mother of God, ………
To build her rainbow worlds of mind and life.

Between the superconscient absolute Light
And the Inconscient’s vast unthinking toil,
In the rolling and routine of Matter’s sleep
And the somnambulist motion of the stars
She forces on the cold unwilling Void
Her adventure of life, the passionate dreams of her heart.
Amid the work of darker Powers she is here
To heal the evils and mistakes of Space
And change the tragedy of the ignorant world
Into a Divine Comedy of joy
And the laughter and the rapture of God’s bliss.
The Mother of God is mother of our souls;
We are the partners of his birth in Time,
Inheritors we share his eternity.

THE LOST BOAT

At the way’s end when the shore raised up its dim line and remote lights from the port glimmered,
Then a cloud darkened the sky’s brink and the wind’s scream was the shrill laugh of a loosed demon
And the huge passion of storm leaped with its bright stabs and the long crashing of death’s thunder;
As if haled by an unseen hand fled the boat lost on the wide homeless forlorn ocean.

Is it Chance smites? is it Fate’s irony? dead workings or blind purpose of brute Nature?
Or man’s own deeds that return back on his doomed head with a stark justice, a fixed vengeance?
Or a dread Will from behind Life that regards pain and salutes death with a hard laughter?
Is it God’s might or a Force rules in this dense jungle of events, deeds and our thought’s strivings?

Yet perhaps sank not the bright lives and their glad venturings foiled, drowned in the grey ocean,
But with long wandering they reached an unknown shore and a strange sun and a new azure,
Amid bright splendour of beast glories and birds’ music and deep hues, an enriched Nature
And a new life that could draw near to divine meanings and touched close the concealed purpose.

In a chance happening, fate’s whims and the blind workings or dead drive of a brute Nature,
In her dire Titan caprice, strength that to death drifts and to doom, hidden a Will labours.
Not with one moment of sharp close or the slow fall of a dim curtain the play ceases:
Yet is there Time to be crossed, lives to be lived out, the unplayed acts of the soul’s drama.

Turn to the Alone and the Absolute, turn to the Eternal:

Be only eternity, peace and silence,

O world-transcending nameless Oneness,

Spirit immortal.

SILENCE IS ALL

1
Silence is all, say the sages.
Silence watches the work of the ages;
In the book of Silence the cosmic Scribe has written his cosmic pages:
Silence is all, say the sages.

2
What then of the word, O speaker?
What then of the thought, O thinker?
Thought is the wine of the soul and the word is the beaker;
Life is the banquet-table as the soul of the sage is the drinker.

3
What of the wine, O mortal?
I am drunk with the wine as I sit at Wisdom’s portal,
Waiting for the Light beyond thought and the Word immortal.
Long I sit in vain at Wisdom’s portal.

4
How shalt thou know the Word when it comes, O seeker?
How shalt thou know the Light when it breaks, O witness?
I shall hear the voice of the God within me and grow wiser and meeker;
I shall be the tree that takes in the light as its food,  I shall drink its nectar of sweetness.

THOUGHT THE PARACLETE

THE ISLAND SUN

Jung – the spirit in man art and literature – 1

RELATION OF
ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY TO POETRY ( Poetry as a work of Art)

In order to do justice to a work of art, analytical psychology must rid itself
entirely of medical prejudice; for a work of art is not a disease, and consequently requires a different approach from the medical one. A doctor
naturally has to seek out the causes of a disease in order to pull it up by the
roots, but just as naturally the psychologist must adopt exactly the opposite
attitude towards a work of art. Instead of investigating its typically human
determinants, he will inquire first of all into its meaning, and will concern
himself with its determinants only in so far as they enable him to understand it
more fully. . The personal orientation which the doctor needs when confronted with
the question of aetiology in medicine is quite out of place in dealing with a
work of art, just because a work of art is not a human being, but is something
suprapersonal. It is a thing and not a personality; hence it cannot be judged by
personal criteria. Indeed, the special significance of a true work of art resides
in the fact that it has escaped from the limitations of the personal and has
soared beyond the personal concerns of its creator.
I must confess from my own experience that it is not at all easy for a
doctor to lay aside his professional bias when considering a work of art and
look at it with a mind cleared of the current biological causality. But I have
come to learn that although a psychology with a purely biological orientation
can explain a good deal about man in general, it cannot be applied to a work
of art and still less to man as creator. A purely causalistic psychology is only
able to reduce every human individual to a member of the species Homo
sapiens, since its range is limited to what is transmitted by heredity or derived
from other sources. But a work of art is not transmitted or derived—it is a
creative reorganization of those very conditions to which a causalistic
psychology must always reduce it.

Since nobody can penetrate to the heart of nature, you will not expect
psychology to do the impossible and offer a valid explanation of the secret of
creativity. Like every other science, psychology has only a modest
contribution to make towards a deeper understanding of the phenomena of
life, and is no nearer than its sister sciences to absolute knowledge.
We have talked so much about the meaning of works of art that one can hardly suppress a doubt as to whether art really “means” anything at all.
Perhaps art has no “meaning,” at least not as we understand meaning. Perhaps
it is like nature, which simply is and “means” nothing beyond that. Is
“meaning” necessarily more than mere interpretation—an interpretation
secreted into something by an intellect hungry for meaning? Art, it has been
said, is beauty, and “a thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” It needs no meaning,
for meaning has nothing to do with art. Within the sphere of art, I must accept
the truth of this statement. But when I speak of the relation of psychology to
art we are outside its sphere, and it is impossible for us not to speculate. We
must interpret, we must find meanings in things, otherwise we would be quite
unable to think about them. We have to break down life and events, which are
self-contained processes, into meanings, images, concepts, well knowing that
in doing so we are getting further away from the living mystery. As long as
we ourselves are caught up in the process of creation, we neither see nor
understand; indeed we ought not to understand, for nothing is more injurious
to immediate experience than cognition. But for the purpose of cognitive
understanding we must detach ourselves from the creative process and look at
it from the outside; only then does it become an image that expresses what we
are bound to call “meaning.” What was a mere phenomenon before becomes
something that in association with other phenomena has meaning, that has a
definite role to play, serves certain ends, and exerts meaningful effects. Andwhen we have seen all this we get the feeling of having understood and
explained something.

That is the secret of great art, and of its effect upon us. The creative
process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious
activation of an archetypal image, and in elaborating and shaping this image
into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the
language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back
to the deepest springs of life. Therein lies the social significance of art: it is
constantly at work educating the spirit of the age, conjuring up the forms in
which the age is most lacking.

Collected songs of Cold Mountain and Translator’s Preface

Excerpts from the Translator’s Preface: The milieu to which he retreated perhaps directly from the glittering life of the capital was the “world of
mountain men”- a free society of eccentric recluses from backgrounds
ranging between scholarly elegance on the one hand to total illiteracy on
the other. They tended to dwell in solitude or, more often, in secluded
communities in relatively inaccessible places, preferably well-wooded hills.
Seeking beauty in nature rather than in art ….. Here the air was pure, and genuine solitude achievable with the greatest ease.

Theoretically,
such realization is achievable anywhere at all; but, in practice, it is easier to
achieve when living close to nature, as the mountain men did. Sunshine
and rain, the thunder of cataracts, the whispering of streams, the moon
riding upon a sea of cloud, the expression glimpsed in the badger’s eyes,
the creak and sigh of bamboos, the angle of a leaning pine, the pattern of
moss on an ancient rock, the voices of insects and songs of birds, the hooting of owls and feathers of cranes-these and the myriad aspects of nature were recognized as direct intimations of the marvelous functions of
the sublime, illimitable, boundless, indivisible Tao .

Having realized what I really am, I can face all that may come with laughing equanimity, ……… -ha ha-ha-ha-ha! It’s all a game. Any part will suit me fine. You are going to
give me a thirty-two course (plus side dishes) Chinese banquet ? Thanks,
I’ll enjoy that. We have only a bowl or two of inferior-quality boiled rice
for dinner ? That will go down very nicely. We have nothing on which to
dine? Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the
moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines.
You see how enviable is the lot of people who have realized the Tao!
Nothing can upset them.

Cold Mountain didn’t bully
or push to get things done his way, or bore people with pious platitudes,
or go around telling them how wrong they were, or how right his own beliefs
and actions. He never interfered with people..…

Some of Cold Mountain’s poems
are so full of the magic of moonlight, gnarled pines, and running water that, after reading one, I like to close my eyes and imagine myself in the
heart of the scene described. (Described? Well, no. Those brief poems just
touch on one or two telling details of a scene, allowing the reader to participate, Taoist fashion, in the poetic act of creation, by supplying the rest
from his own mind-the Tao!)
Though “my” Tao has led me into a less strenuous manner of contemplative life, I clearly recognize the mountain men’s choice as superior
to all others. They were not nearer the Tao than you or me-since it has
from the first been closer to us than our own noses-but they had a far
better chance of realizing in this life just how near that is, and of joyfully
savoring the bliss that comes with full realization.
What does all this amount to? You (the Tao) go to some mountain
forest (the Tao) to follow the path (Tao) that leads to realizing (Tao-ing)
the Tao! It sounds crazy, but it’s wonderful. If you don’t believe that, try it
for a while-very sincerely, though not of course seriously (in the sense of
experiencing humorless dedication, like a religious fanatic), for the Tao is
most easily found when laughter comes spontaneously and one is comfortably realized. Strain, tension, solemnity will blind you to its lovely
radiance.

Cold mountain poems :

Because the mind never stops
delusions rise like mist
the moon of our nature is clear and bright
in the open it shines without limit

I advise the monks I meet
focus on the deeper teachings
concentrate on getting free
don’t be destroyed by greed
there are laymen by the score
who know love of gold is wrong
know then what a wise man seeks
just let go and take what comes

I see Tientai summit
rising high above the crowd
the rhyme of pines and bamboo in the wind
the rhythm of the tide in the moonlight
I see the mountain’s green reach below
white clouds discussing the unseen
wilderness means mountains and water

I retired to the edge of a forest
and chose the life of a farmer
forthright in my dealings
no flattery in my speech
I prefer unpolished jade
you can have your jewels
I could never join the flock……..

I enjoy the simple path
between dark vines and mountain caves
the wilderness has room to roam
with white clouds for companions
there’s a road but not to town
only mindless men can climb
at night I sit on the rocks alone
until the moon comes up Cold Mountain

All my life too lazy to work
favoring the light to the heavy
others take up a career
I hold onto a sutra
a scroll with nothing inside
I open wherever I go
for every illness it has a cure
it heals with whatever works
once your mind contains no plan
wherever you are it’s alert

My poems are poems alright
though some call them gathas
poems or gathas what’s the difference
readers should be careful
take your time going through
don’t think they’re so easy
use them to improve yourself
they’ll make it much more fun

Spring water is pure in an emerald stream
moonlight is white on Cold Mountain
silence thoughts and the spirit becomes clear
focus on emptiness and the world grows still
This poem offers a summary of the Tientai meditation technique known as chih-kuan
(silencing-focusing), or abstraction from thought and contemplation of reality. In his
commentary to the fenwangching (Sutra of the Benevolent King), Chih-yi defines the latter thus: “When formless wisdom illuminates the formless world, both inside and out are
still, for both are seen as empty.”

Merit refers to the wonderful effects of selfless acts in freeing beings
from delusion and suffering. A bodhisattva is one who works for the enlightenment and
liberation of others. Forbearance is one of the six virtues cultivated by the bodhisattva.
The others are charity, morality, devotion, meditation, and wisdom. In the last line, some
editions have chen (true) in place of chen (anger), in which case the line would read:
“forbearance protects the true mind

Cold mountain – Han Shan

Zen poetry at its finest…..Nature – best teacher

Time drives as a horse with seven reins, thousand-eyed, unaging….. be the water that flows, finding its own level, even if it is soaked away by the earth, with no trace left behind

this simple pleasure that could make me feel strange and sad and light at the same time was something I can call freedom. And in this ‘freedom’ rested the beginnings of faith, of an inexplicable lightness which was like the spreading glow from a lamp, moving away, carrying one away, as it were, from everything else, something which fails to measure the expanse of one’s life. For me, today, a good poem probably does just that. http://www.thehindu.com/books/singing-of-trampled-grass/article19689961.ece

 

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/open-page/rain-spotting-on-natures-canvas/article19699449.ece

A couple of coconut trees spiral up into the blue sky. This is the square canvas with the ‘nature painting’ that my window affords — assuredly a sight for the sore eyes of this city-dweller wearied by quotidian cares. And so, many an hour on Sunday mornings is spent lazily focussing and defocussing on this work of art, embellished by a gentle breeze and bird-calls of various tones.

Water-brushed hues

And then comes the monsoon. Same time, same place. But the painting is now getting ‘water-brushed’. ………..The hitherto still-life painting seems to have taken on a life of its own. The tone and texture of its green components seem to alter as the raindrops descend on them. I watch in fascination as the green carpet below winks and glints at me. These are the hundreds of small leaves, of varying shades of green, doing flip-flops as they give in to the pressure of the droplets. The rapid change of surfaces creates an overall shimmering effect, maintaining a true rhythm with the steady rain.

Meanwhile, a little above the ground, the large taro leaves sway like elephant ears. Hardly under any pressure from this rain, they coolly flash and flaunt their water-droplet pearls. At eye-level is a staid wall of green in the background, formed by the closely packed, unremarkable leaves of a clump of trees. The rain seems to just disappear into this wall, leaving no trace of moisture. Shifting my gaze, I look up to see the unruffled leaves of the coconut palm shirking off this precipitation in the form of drops dripping from the tip of each leaflet. And so this painting gets embellished for those magical moments. Missing in action are the butterflies and dragonflies, subdued out of their flight by the rain.

And so, the minutes stretch to an hour or so as nature does its stuff, uplifting the mundane to the ethereal. Myriad film song lines pass through the mind, describing gentle rain. Time passes, fleetingly, unknowingly; the spell is usually broken by the lunch call or some guests. Reluctantly, I peel myself from the window, thankful to both circumstance and nature, for the serendipitous gift. And, a line from another poem (by John Updike) comes to mind: Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

Singing of trampled grass  Jayanta Mahapatra

I remember one of those simple pleasures that seemed to provide me with a new beginning or give a new meaning to my days. This was when I would let my feet hang still in the waters of a flowing stream and feel the water flow past past me. Or, climbing up the old mango tree, lying on a low branch, I appeared to be in another world, perhaps giving me a glimpse of the world inside of me.

Who will cry the cry of the dropping leaf? Who will whisper the whisper of the summer breeze? The politician or the poet? Or the silent pain of the pebble kicked by a child? Or the sob of the rose plucked off its stem? Who will mourn the moan of the trampled grass? Only the poet.

Perhaps poetry shall always remain an attempt to remove the burden of time from this world, and poems will continue to do this through images, metaphors, symbols. Time, ever present, ever passing, making us wakeful while we are asleep, making us hear our pulse in the silence of the night. I quote a line from the Atharva Veda XIX: 53.

Time drives as a horse with seven reins,

thousand-eyed, unaging

possessing much seed;

him the inspired poets mount;

his wheels are all beings.

And one asks: Does a poet use time to get away from time? Does he surrender to this rite, capturing in time a fragile moment of meaning? Merely for the sake of the feeling of freedom?

…..write through my anguish and the awareness of my presence, and in the process reveal myself, perhaps going out of myself, leaping into blindness or light.

Call it freedom. For what we dream can well enter the realm of undream, causing something to come out of it, something like a quiet self-discovery or even prayer, that brings a joy in the recognition of ourselves against the fear of time. Call it freedom.

………… not bother about the conscience of the world — simply be the water that flows, finding its own level, even if it is soaked away by the earth, with no trace left behind. In this, in such a poetry of today, committed to the many worlds we live and believe in — the human, the historical and the moral — can one touch the heart of freedom.

freedom? Is it the path through unknown places of the heart, a path that is both unreal and of a transcendent nature and yet is something that foresees the event of death? ……

Maya Angelou

• 

    http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/maya-angelou-dies-at-86/article6057837.ece

Maya Angelou, a poet and author who rose from poverty, segregation and the harshest of childhoods to become a force on stage, screen and the printed page, has died. She was 86.

Angelou died on Wednesday morning at her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, her son, Guy B. Johnson, said in a statement. The 86-year-old had been a professor of American studies at Wake Forest University since 1982.

“She lived a life as a teacher, activist, artist and human being. She was a warrior for equality, tolerance and peace,” Mr. Johnson said.

Tall and regal, with a deep, majestic voice, Angelou defied all probability and category, becoming one of the first black women to enjoy mainstream success as an author and thriving in virtually every artistic medium. The young single mother who performed at strip clubs to earn a living later wrote and recited the most popular presidential inaugural poem in history. The childhood victim of rape wrote a million-selling memoir, befriended Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and performed on stages around the world.

An actress, singer and dancer in the 1950s and 1960s, she broke through as an author in 1970 with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which became standard (and occasionally censored) reading, and was the first of a multipart autobiography that continued through the decades. In 1993, she was a sensation reading her cautiously hopeful On the Pulse of the Morning at former President Bill Clinton’s first inauguration. Her confident performance openly delighted Mr. Clinton and made the poem a bestseller, if not a critical favourite. For former President George W. Bush, she read another poem, Amazing Peace, at the 2005 Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House.

Angelou was a mentor to Oprah Winfrey, whom she befriended when Ms. Winfrey was still a local television reporter, and often appeared on her friend’s talk show program. She mastered several languages and published not just poetry, but advice books, cookbooks and children’s stories. She wrote music, plays and screenplays, received an Emmy nomination for her acting in Roots, and never lost her passion for dance, the art she considered closest to poetry.

“The line of the dancer — If you watch (Mikhail) Baryshnikov and you see that line, that’s what the poet tries for. The poet tries for the line, the balance,” she told The Associated Press in 2008, shortly before her birthday.

After renaming herself Maya Angelou for the stage (“Maya” was a childhood nickname), she toured in ‘Porgy and Bess’ and Jean Genet’s ‘The Blacks’ and danced with Alvin Ailey. She worked as a coordinator for the civil rights group Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and lived for years in Egypt and Ghana, where she met Malcolm X and remained close to him until his assassination, in 1965. Three years later, she was helping King organize the Poor People’s March in Memphis, Tennessee, where the civil rights leader was slain on Angelou’s 40^th birthday.

“Every year, on that day, Coretta and I would send each other flowers,” Angelou said of King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006.

Angelou was little known outside the theatrical community until I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which might not have happened if James Baldwin hadn’t persuaded Angelou, still grieving over King’s death, to attend a party at Jules Feiffer’s house. Feiffer was so taken by Angelou that he mentioned her to Random House editor Bob Loomis, who persuaded her to write a book.

Angelou’s memoir was occasionally attacked, for seemingly opposite reasons. In a 1999 essay in Harper’s, author Francine Prose criticized Caged Bird as “manipulative” melodrama. Meanwhile, Angelou’s passages about her rape and teen pregnancy have made it a perennial on the American Library Association’s list of works that draw complaints from parents and educators.

“I thought that it was a mild book. There’s no profanity,” Angelou told the AP. “It speaks about surviving, and it really doesn’t make ogres of many people. I was shocked to find there were people who really wanted it banned, and I still believe people who are against the book have never read the book.”

Angelou appeared on several TV programs, notably the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots. She was nominated for a Tony Award in 1973 for her appearance in the play Look Away.

To be free enough to venture into the unknown – my picks from brainpickings

Still I Rise by Maya Angelou

Air

lovely …..free

my dream home

Tuscan Adventure

Tuscan adventure, was it all dreamed

Rolling hills played with mist, so it seemed

The people all smiled, full of life’s joys

Children played, both girls and the boys.

Foods of such taste that I’m drooling right now

As we sat and ate outside as nature allowed

Something so peaceful, a calm to the place

Like a painting on canvas trimmed with white lace…

chores

Thought for today september 9th 2013

Veraiconica's Blog

Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers

but to be fearless when facing them.

Rabindranath Tagore

Photography Credit artfreelance.me Link: http://wp.me/p2Ag2U-5Yo

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Gypsy Girl

Free Verse: Bamboo Grove

solitude

Bastet and Sekhmet's Library

Free Verse

Bamboo Grove

Walking in a bamboo grove
searching for serenity
the rustling leaves
gave me the peace I sought
their shade from harsh light
refreshed my soul.
Basho would say
that harmony can be found
even in a crowded city.
I travelled to a park
among pine trees, palm fronds
and a bamboo grove
and was rewarded.

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