I have seen the vat and the lamp and the fruit-basket by her side,

And witnessed in splashes of psychedelic colours the swords cross,

And felt the early dawn rush like a queen-star in the Milky-Way:

This is the life lit by her smile, this is the enchanted deer-park,

This is the river, and the cherry tree, and the canyon of the Past.

Under the jewelled lamp and by her side is the basket of fruits,

And the great wind is gathered from the elements of her ecstasy,

And deep in the horror of atomic pile is kindled the occult flame.

Suddenly I have become a hyperbola’s arc flung like a cry of calm,

The purple that rends dreaming sleep into far seeing of the Unseen:

I am the epochal gaze of the crescent caught in hues on the canvas,

I am the artistry in sandstone and the sun-temple’s speeding wheels;

I am the rippled lake of lotuses stirred by the thunderer’s rhyme.

All the sorrows are drawn back into apocalyptic gold of the hour,

All the quarters into a single point of the truth-sight’s infinity.

Indeed, there’s no horse-race without the horses, there’s no betting,

There is no red of the ruby, nor the winter-wine’s effervescence;

There is without earth and heaven no roseate flutter of angel-wings:

It is the drumbeat that creates the drum, the twinkling the stars;

It is the mantra that ascends to Silence, and sky to the seed-sounds;

Hence I am the mango-blossoms call between sweetness and the mates,

Between the battle and the loud victory the warrior’s shining strength,—

Between the Unknowable and the Known I am the Unknown’s link.

It is the indivisible Word, and I the form-force of the riven Moment.

RY Deshpande

27 September 1978