Spiritual Poems

[NikolaiI]

God Speaks to Each of Us,
by Rainer Maria Rilke


God speaks to each of us before we are,
Before he's formed us then, in cloudy speech,
But only then, he speaks these words to each
And silently walks with us from the dark:

Driven by your senses, dare
To the edge of longing. Grow
Like a fire's shadowcasting glare
Behind assembled things, so you can spread
Their shapes on me as clothes.
Don't leave me bare.

Let it all happen to you: beauty and dread.
Simply go no feeling is too much
And only this way can we stay in touch.

Near here is the land
That they call Life.
You'll know when you arrive
By how real it is.

Give me your hand.

[NikolaiI]

In Salutation to the Eternal Peace


Men say the world is full of fear and hate,
And all life's ripening harvest-fields await
The restless sickle of relentless fate.

But I, sweet Soul, rejoice that I was born,
When from the climbing terraces of corn
I watch the golden orioles of Thy morn.

What care I for the world's desire and pride,
Who know the silver wings that gleam and glide,
The homing pigeons of Thine eventide?

What care I for the world's loud weariness,
Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost bless
With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

Say, shall I heed dull presages of doom,
Or dread the rumoured loneliness and gloom,
The mute and mythic terror of the tomb?

For my glad heart is drunk and drenched with Thee,
O inmost wind of living ecstasy!
O intimate essence of eternity!


Sarojini Naidu
(1879 - 1949)

[NikolaiI]

Where the Mind is Without Fear,
by Rabindranath Tagore

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 heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

[NikolaiI]

The Infinite a sudden Guest
Has been assumed to be-
But how can that stupendous come
Which never went away?

-Emily Dickinson

[NikolaiI]

Krishna Govinda,
by Alex Ferguson


Krishna I am linked to you!

You the source of all,
and my source too.
You are with me always.
One day I will come to You,
the way paved by your prophets,
Tukaram, Mirabai -
who know you but enlightened ones?

You are the source of all,
You are in the heart of all.
You ever circle us
as we circle You.

O Bliss! to act without desire,
completely free, in knowledge,
with no thought but You.

O Hymn to the soul,
Radhe Govinda,
Govinda Govinda!
You are above this world,
as this world is from your soul.
The Highest of the High,
you are beyond yet within.
Ever above, yet ever within,
the source of all.

Krishna Govinda,
Govinda Govinda!
O hymn! to rise with you!
To know the unchanged soul,
the innermost recess within;
the waves equal with calm.
O Krishna let your mercy flow,
One day I will be with You.

Govinda, you are in the heart of
every being.
The limitless space of cosmos
is within.

[NikolaiI]

Liberation,
by Sri Aurobindo

I have thrown from me the whirling dance of mind
And stand now in the spirit's silence free,
Timeless and deathless beyond creature-kind,
The centre of my own eternity.

I have escaped and the small self is dead;
I am immortal, alone, ineffable;
I have gone out from the universe I made,
And have grown nameless and immeasurable.

My mind is hushed in a wide and endless light,
My heart a solitude of delight and peace,
My sense unsnared by touch and sound and sight,
My body a point in white infinities.

I am the one Being's sole immobile Bliss:
No one I am, I who am all that is.

[NikolaiI]

Translated by Sri Aurobindo, the original Bengali song by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee

Bande Mataram

Mother, I bow to thee!
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleams,
Cool with thy winds of delight,
Dark fields waving, Mother of might,
Mother free.

Glory of moonlight dreams
Over thy branches and lordly streams,
Clad in thy blossoming trees,
Mother, giver of ease,
Laughing low and sweet!
Mother, I kiss thy feet,
Speaker sweet and low!
Mother, to thee I bow.

Who hath said thou art weak in thy lands,
When the swords flash out in twice seventy million hands
And seventy millions voices roar
Thy dreadful name from shore to shore?
With many strengths who art mighty and stored,
To thee I call, Mother and Lord!
Thou who savest, arise and save!
To her I cry who ever her foemen drave
Back from plain and sea
And shook herself free.

Thou art wisdom, thou art law,
Thou our heart, our soul, our breath,
Thou the love divine, the awe
In our hearts that conquers death.
Thine the strength that nerves the arm,
Thine the beauty, thine the charm.
Every image made divine
In our temples is but thine.

Thou art Durga, Lady and Queen,
With her hands that strike and her swords of sheen,
Thou art Lakshmi lotus-throned,
Pure and perfect without peer,
Mother, lend thine ear.
Rich with thy hurrying streams,
Bright with thy orchard gleams,
Dark of hue, O candid-fair


In thy soul, with jewelled hair
And thy glorious smile divine,
Loveliest of all earthly lands,
Showering wealth from well-stored hands!
Mother, mother mine!
Mother sweet, I bow to thee,
Mother great and free.

[NikolaiI]

The Kingdom Within

There is a kingdom of the spirit's ease.
It is not in this helpless swirl of thought,
Foam from the world-sea or spray-whisper caught,
With which we build mind's shifting symmetries,
Nor in life's stuff of passionate unease,
Nor the heart's unsure emotions frailty wrought
Nor trivial clipped sense-joys soon brought to nought
Nor in this body's solid transiences.

Wider behind than the vast universe
Our spirit scans the drama and the stir,
A peace, a light, an ecstasy, a power
Waiting at the end of blindness and the curse
That veils it from its ignorant minister,
The grandeur of its free eternal hour.

Sri Aurobindo
14-3-1936

[NikolaiI]

I Know the Way You Can Get
by, Hafiz

I know the way you can get
When you have not had a drink of Love:

Your face hardens,
Your sweet muscles cramp.
Children become concerned
About a strange look that appears in your eyes
Which even begins to worry your own mirror
And nose.

Squirrels and birds sense your sadness
And call an important conference in a tall tree.
They decide which secret code to chant
To help your mind and soul.

Even angels fear that brand of madness
That arrays itself against the world
And throws sharp stones and spears into
The innocent
And into one's self.

O I know the way you can get
If you have not been drinking Love:

You might rip apart
Every sentence your friends and teachers say,
Looking for hidden clauses.

You might weigh every word on a scale
Like a dead fish.

You might pull out a ruler to measure
From every angle in your darkness
The beautiful dimensions of a heart you once
Trusted.

I know the way you can get
If you have not had a drink from Love's
Hands.

That is why all the Great Ones speak of
The vital need
To keep remembering God,
So you will come to know and see Him
As being so Playful
And Wanting,
Just Wanting to help.

That is why Hafiz says:
Bring your cup near me.
For all I care about
Is quenching your thirst for freedom!

All a Sane man can ever care about
Is giving Love!

[NikolaiI]

Oh I am really happy I came across this poem! I had seen the last two lines as a quote of Blake's and I loved it, but now I can read the whole thing!

The Divine Image
by, William Blake

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is Man, his child and care.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, turk, or jew;
Where Mercy, Love, & Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.

[NikolaiI]

Peace
by Swami Vivekananda

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!

[NikolaiI]

A Little,
by Sri Chinmoy

A little joy have I of ceaseless joy,
A little day of timeless day.
Yet knows no bound this empty show of mine;
I march along a goalless way.

O Love! A desert within me ever pines.
Do turn it into a song of dawn.
I know not in what hour of evil night
Thou art, my Lord, from me withdrawn.

Life now must reach Thy Breath of Bliss supreme,
Make Thee the one and only Guide.
Thou art the Bridge between my death and birth;
O let my longings in Thee abide.

[blazeofglory]

Nikolia,

All of these poems are really beautiful and deep. I like them very much. There is so much in these poems. All of these are inspirational and inundate our minds with so much love and compassion.

Arbindo is intellectually appealing, Rumi and Mira Bai are really inspiring. Love is manifest in them.

You have really a wonderful selection and such selection is generally difficult to make unless one is inspired.

Such poems soothe and blaze our path.

To this selection if you have added a few poems of Kabir it would have been much better.

Kabir rose above time and space. Even in his days he rose above all racial and national boundaries to embrace all religions and all people on equal footing.

Kabir unlike the rest of saints of the lineage was enlightened. He did not advocate for a particular faith.

Even today he is equally appealing. He was a great humanist. He was not a ritualistic the way the rest of spiritual Gurus were.

In Kabir I see a real spiritualist.

[blazeofglory]

Where the Mind is Without Fear,
by Rabindranath Tagore

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 heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

This is really beautiful and of course one of the most famous poems written by Tagore. Tagore got inspirations from the Upanishads and as such his poems are very deep.

[pagebypage]

I just stumbled upon this untitled little quatrain in a book I am reading. It was never previously published.

"Hide Thou Thy face in clouds and mysteries
Wield as Thou wilt Thy power that makes and mars
But heat. That in Thy roaring wheel of stars
One atom dares to love Thee ere it dies.

G.K. Chesterton

found among the archives at Top Meadow Cottage, est. date written 1890's