After Death

The curtains were half drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes, rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where thro’ the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say:
“Poor child, poor child:” and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head:
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm tho’ I am cold.

Christina Rossetti

Leave Me Alone

Leave me alone, leave me alone.
I need my rest in my soaring nest.
My bleeding heart for God’s bending Ears.
His Heart my host, His Soul my guest.

Leave me alone, my play is done.
O world, no more shall I stab your pride.
Your lessons wild are harrows of death
I shall unlearn-in God to hide.

Leave me alone, leave me alone.
I have now seen my goal’s highest Soul.
In the glow and flow of Silence-Sea
My life of cries has found its role.

By Sri Chinmoy

Peace

Behold, it comes in might,
The power that is not power,
The light that is in darkness,
The shade in dazzling light.

It is joy that never spoke,
And grief unfelt, profound,
Immortal life unlived,
Eternal death unmourned.

It is not joy nor sorrow,
But that which is between,
It is not noght nor morrow,
But that which joins them in.

It is sweet rest in music;
And pause in sacred art;
The silence between speaking;
Between two fits of passion –
It is the calm of heart.

It is beauty never seen,
And love that stands alone,
It is song that lives un-sung,
And knowledge never known.

It is death between two lives,
And lull between two storms,
The void whence rose creation,
And that where it returns.

To it the tear-drop goes,
To spread the smiling form
It is the Goal of Life,
And Peace — its only home!

– Swami Vivekananda

The Instinct of Hope

Is there another world for this frail dust
To warm with life and be itself again?
Something about me daily speaks there must,
And why should instinct nourish hopes in vain?
‘Tis nature’s prophesy that such will be,
And everything seems struggling to explain
The close sealed volume of its mystery.
Time wandering onward keeps its usual pace
As seeming anxious of eternity,
To meet that calm and find a resting place.
E’en the small violet feels a future power
And waits each year renewing blooms to bring,
And surely man is no inferior flower
To die unworthy of a second spring?

John Clare

The End

It is time for me to go, mother; I am going.

When in the paling darkness of the lonely dawn
you stretch your arms for your baby in the bed,
I shall say, “Baby is not there!”
- mother, I am going.

I shall become a delicate draught of air
and caress you; and I shall be ripples
in the water when you bathe;
and kiss you and kiss you again.

In the gusty night when the rain patters on the leaves
you will hear my whisper in your bed,
and my laughter will flash with the lightning
through the open window into your room.

If you lie awake, thinking of your baby till late into the night,
I shall sing to you form the stars, “Sleep, mother, sleep.”

On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed,
and lie upon your bosom while you sleep.

I shall become a dream, and through the little opening
of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep;
and when you wake up and look round startled,
like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness.

When, on the great festival of PUJA,
the neighbours’ children come and play about the house,
I shall melt into the music of the flute
and throb in your heart all day.

Dear suntie will come with your PUJA presents and will ask,
“Where is our baby, sister? Mother you tell her softly,
“He is in the pupils of my eyes,
he is my body and my soul.”

- Rabindranath Tagore

Term

At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday recurrences of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
who would ever have thought it was the one
saying itself from the beginning through
all its uses and circumstances to
utter at last that meaning of its own
for which it had long been the only word
though it seems now that any word would do

By:W.S.Merwin

Song: Soul’s Joy Now I Am Gone

SOUL’S joy, now I am gone,
And you alone,
—Which cannot be,
Since I must leave myself with thee,
And carry thee with me—
Yet when unto our eyes
Absence denies
Each other’s sight,
And makes to us a constant night,
When others change to light ;
O give no way to grief,
But let belief
Of mutual love
This wonder to the vulgar prove,
Our bodies, not we move.

Let not thy wit beweep
Words but sense deep ;
For when we miss
By distance our hope’s joining bliss,
Even then our souls shall kiss ;
Fools have no means to meet,
But by their feet ;
Why should our clay
Over our spirits so much sway,
To tie us to that way?
O give no way to grief,

- John Donne

Voices Of The Night : A Psalm Of Life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, — act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

- Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

“Mr. Longfellow said of this poem: ‘I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression.’ Before it was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, October, 1838, it was read by the poet to his college class at the close of a lecture on Goethe. Its title, though used now exclusively for this poem, was originally, in the poet’s mind, a generic one. He notes from time to time that he has written a psalm, a psalm of death, or another psalm of life. The ‘psalmist’ is thus the poet himself. When printed in the Knickerbocker it bore as a motto the lines from Crashaw:

Life that shall send
A challenge to its end,
And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend.”