You came to my door in the dawn and sang;
it angered me to be awakened from sleep,
and you went away unheeded.
You came in the noon and asked for water;
it vexed me in my work,
and you were sent away with reproaches.
You came in the evening with your flaming torches.
You seemed to me like a terror and I shut my door.
Now in the midnight I sit alone in my lampless room
and call you back whom I turned away in insult.
I have a piece in this new collection, out today (May 30, 2025) in the Indian market and later in the year for international markets.
GoodReads Page Amazon.in Page
I have a piece in this new collection, out tomorrow (May 30, 2025) in the Indian market and later in the year for international markets.
GoodReads Page Amazon.in Page
Penguin Book of Indian Ghost Stories by Ruskin Bond
My song has put off her adornments.
She has no pride of dress and decoration.
Ornaments would mar our union;
they would come between thee and me;
their jingling would drown thy whispers.
My poet's vanity dies in shame before thy sight.
O master poet, I have sat down at thy feet.
Only let me make my life simple and straight,
like a flute of reed for thee to fill with music.
NOTE: This poem is sometimes titled, “My song has put off her adornments,” or – simply – Song VII.
How to Love in Sanskrit by Anusha Rao
One Hundred Poems of Kabir by Kabir
On this tree is a bird:
It dances in the joy of life.
No one knows where it is:
And who knows what the burden
Of its music may be?
Where the branches throw a deep shade,
There does it have its nest:
And it comes in the evening
And flies away in the morning,
And says not a word
Of that which it means.
None tell me of this bird
That sings within me.
It is neither coloured nor colourless:
It has neither form nor outline:
It sits in the shadow of love.
It dwells within the Unattainable,
The Infinite, and the Eternal;
And no one marks
When it comes and goes.
Kabir says, “O brother Sadhu!
Deep is the mystery.
Let wise men seek to know
where rests that bird.”
NOTE: This is the translation by Rabindranath Tagore from the 1915 text, One Hundred Poems of Kabir. This is poem #30 (XXX) of that volume.
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 heave of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
NOTE: This poem is often entitled “Let My Country Awake,” particularly when it is anthologized independently of the larger Gitanjali poem.
Who are you, reader, reading my poems my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories
of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning,
sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 