Dear Friends,
Amal Kiran has expressed, through his poems, how he has evolved from an atheist in his youth to one of the greatest sadhaks of the Integral Yoga. In his poems, an invitation is obtained – to share his creative bliss and his world of beauty. And when he is not writing about the outer or the inner worlds, he is writing about his Gurus, Sri Aurobindo and the Mother; after all, his entire worlds (inner and outer) revolve around them only.
As the last installment of our series of tributes on Amal Kiran we are presenting a small bouquet of poems composed by him on Sri Aurobindo and the Mother.
With warm regards,
Anurag Banerjee
Founder,
Overman Foundation.
*
Sri Aurobindo
All heaven’s secrecy lit to one face
Crowning with calm the body’s blinded cry—
A soul of upright splendour like the noon.
But only shadowless love can breathe this pure
Sun-blossom fragrant with eternity—
Eagles of rapture lifting flickerless
A giant trance wide-winged on golden air.
The Master
Bard rhyming earth to paradise,
Time-conqueror with prophet eyes,
Body of upright flawless fire,
Star-strewing hands that never tire—
In Him at last earth-gropings reach
Omniscient calm, omnipotent speech,
Love omnipresent without ache!
Does still a stone that cannot wake
Keep hurling through your mortal mind
Its challenge at the epiphany?
If you would see this blindness break,
Follow the heart’s humility—
Question not with your shallow gaze
The Infinite focused in that face,
But, when the unshadowed limbs go by,
Touch with your brow the white football:
A rhythm profound shall silence them all!
Tennis with the Mother
She seems but playing tennis—
The whole world is in that game!
A little ball she is striking—
What is struck is a huge white flame
Leaping across time’s barrier
Between God’s hush, man’s heart,
And while the exchange goes on speeding
The two shall never part.
In scoring the play’s progress
The result of minds that move,
One word in constant usage
Is the mystic syllable “Love”.
And the one high act repeated
Over and over again
By either side is “Service”
And it never is done in vain.
For, whether defeat or triumph
Is the end, each movement goes
Soulward: through this short pastime
Eternity comes more close!
The Signature: Sri Aurobindo
Sharp-hewn yet undertoned with mystery,
A brief black sign from the Incommunicable
Making the Eternal’s Night mix with our day
To deepen and deepen the shallow goldenness
We hug to our heart! Laughing whip-lash of love
That leaves a wonder-weal holding bright secrets
Within its snake whose coils are centuries
But whose straight sweep is the backbone of One Bliss!
The characters go flaming up and down
With all time’s venture twixt two ecstatic ends.
Clutching with gentle finger our dumb desire
A slanting full-bodied soar loops a firm loop
Of light around some lone invisible peak—
Followed by steady twin strokes toward the same goal,
Yet smooth and statured close to the human heart.
Then one curve-straightening gracefully girdled stance,
A peace and pulchritude and potency,
A slender pyramid chasing a viewless line
Within, to an uprightnoonthat knows all truth.
Soon from the girdle a quick smiling leap
Across, spaced with a pair of vertical dreams
Still hinting unfallen heights, and then the term
Of all this labour and rapture in a full sweet circle,
Lackless, complete with godhead boundless in a point.
But, never a stagnant splendour, it casts a hook
Answering the curl before, with which the Name
Of the Nameless unwound in the hours, by a curl behind
Downward to dig and drag the dark Divine
Out of some heaven made hell, the Abyss that is All!
At the Samadhi of Sri Aurobindo
Majestic master of the immutable Light,
Love like a universe thronged within your heart:
Brooding in silence across lonely years
On secret heavens a-dream in infinite hell,
You found the hammer to break the Dragon’s sleep
And free from burying black the fallen stars.
But from each throb of God kindled in earth
You flung a human heart-beat out of Time:
You shortened your sovereign life to greaten the dust.
Your body, dropped from your spirit’s hold on high,
Lays the foundation of a clay-built sky!
Always the Light came down from the limitless blue,
Gold gushing through the head to a heart God-drunk.
Now from the soul’s sleep rose one dazzling wave,
Uttering a secret of eternity locked
In caves dumbfounded with a vast black bliss.
It say how sheer divinity grew dust,
The miracled love which left the heart of the sun
And crouched with folded fire below Time’s feet
To give huge wings to the atom’s reverie.
The surge of light lifted our bodies up
As though in laughing answer to heaven’s leap down
Into the poisoning space of bone and flesh,
Earth now was ready to enter infinitude.
A blind snake that had swallowed all the stars
Unrolled a boundless mystery flecked with flame
And undulated shining centuries.
But none riding the rapture of the glow
Saw the still King of the new life’s luminous realm
Tamer and charmer of mortality’s night—
One Heart whose deep on gold-dense deep of love
Measured the abyss whose cry is the whole world’s death!
*
Following is an extract from a talk by C.V. Devan Nair titled “Sri Aurobindo and the Tomorrow of the Earth” given at the Savitri Solar Dome, Creston, Colorado, USA on August 15, 1994.
“I had greatly regretted not having had Sri Aurobindo’s personal darshan. I had been busy nurturing a political revolution in the years when he still walked our planet.
“Nonetheless, a wonderful poem by Sri Aurobindo’s foremost poet disciple, K.D. Sethna (whom he had named Amal Kiran–The Clear Ray), came as a near substitute for the actual darshan. It is simply titled–The Master.
“When I first read this poem, a profound gratitude welled up in my deepest heart. It was as if Amal’s lines gave me the much-coveted darshan of the Time-conqueror with prophet eyes, and I felt a benediction on my brow from that white footfall. And I said in my heart: “Thank you, dear Amal, thank you!”
World Union Magazine,
Vol: XXXVI, No. 1, March 1995 issue, pp. 17-18.
For all of us who have not had live darshan of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, these lines a blessing to read.
Rathi
Thanks a lot Anurag-da
Parul
I never had the opportunity of seeing the master and the mother.I am thankful,as the poems have provided an opportunity to have darshan of Sri.Aurobindo and the mother.
P.R.Redy