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Friday
Julia’s birthday is today—we both turn 72 this year—so here’s a love lyric by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Julia and I will be celebrating our 50th wedding anniversary in June, and I never cease to be amazed at how my tenderness towards her continues to swell.
I especially like Tagore’s vision of love as a primal force that takes shapes that “renew and renew forever.” And how he sees this love our ours merging with “the memories of all loves,” as well as with “the songs of every poet past and forever.”
That’s what poetry does for us: it moves us past our individual selves and connects us, not only with humanity generally, but with the spiritual energies that flow through the universe. However small we may feel at times, we are all of us, in such relationships, participating in something immense.
Unending Love
By Rabindranath Tagore
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a polestar piercing the darkness of time:
You become an image of what is remembered forever.You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell-
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life.
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet past and forever.
Happy birthday, Julia Ruth Miksch Bates.
