Journey

Where the stone-cleft rivulet, restless and bright,
meets Deodhani’s twin-bosomed tide in flight,
its laughing turbulence slowly grows still
as though some yogi upon a moonlit hill
had drawn the world’s tumult into his soul,
till silence alone remained the whole.

The tears of streams,
the lament of rivers,
forever toward the ocean flow;
untiring beneath the sun and storm,
through dusk’s dim hush and dawn’s first glow.

Even so—
the “I” moves toward the “We,”
the soul toward the Vast Eternity,
the sky toward the fathomless Void,
and Time itself, by Time destroyed,
into Mahākāla’s shoreless sea.

Yet some rivers lose their way,
becoming dead canals of clay;
their thirst for oceans left undone,
their songs unfinished beneath the sun.

For when the “I”
moves only round the cage of “I,”
ensnared within the circling snare
of senses and the Elements Five,
the sea it sought beyond the self
within the river learns to die.

And ah, dear heart—
the whirlpools wrought
by deed and knowledge, thought by thought,
are no less deep, no less severe;
their darkened currents draw us near.

Is this world truth—
or shadow-play?
Is dream the lamp that lights the way?
Or waking but a fleeting ray
cast briefly on eternal clay?

When thought itself grows still at last,
dream and waking fade and pass;
all dissolves like evening mist
upon the mirror of the Vast.

O Lord beyond all name and form,
whose virtues know no shore nor end,
beneath Thy crimson lotus-feet
grant this weary soul descend.

For only those eternal feet
know where death’s hidden thresholds lie;
and death is emptiness alone—
a sky where all illusions die.

The Void alone the Truth may be;
within the Void spreads sky and sea,
within the Void all mortal birth
returns like dust unto the earth.

And yet again,
upon that shoreless, wave-less sea,
shall rise the musk-sweet tides of thought
from formless dark mysteriously.

Thought is the “I,”
thought the cosmic gyre;
within thought’s ever-turning wheel
revolves creation’s hidden fire.