morning.


Madana

Like an endless meaning in the narrow span of a song.


Chitra

The southern breeze caressed me to sleep. From the flowering
Malati bower overhead silent kisses dropped over my body.
On my hair, my breast, my feet, each flower chose a bed to die
on. I slept. And, suddenly in the depth of my sleep, I felt as
if some intense eager look, like tapering fingers of flame,
touched my slumbering body. I started up and saw the Hermit
standing before me. The moon had moved to the west, peering
through the leaves to espy this wonder of divine art wrought in a
fragile human frame. The air was heavy with perfume; the silence
of the night was vocal with the chirping of crickets; the
reflections of the trees hung motionless in the lake; and with
his staff in his hand he stood, tall and straight and still, like
a forest tree. It seemed to me that I had, on opening my eyes,
died to all realities of life and undergone a dream birth into a
shadow land. Shame slipped to my feet like loosened clothes. I
heard his call--"Beloved, my most beloved!" And all my forgotten
lives united as one and responded to it. I said, "Take me, take
all I am!" And I stretched out my arms to him. The moon set
behind the trees. One curtain of darkness covered all. Heaven
and earth, time and space, pleasure and pain, death and life