Poems of Narad

Night Chill

Into a world of darkness born
Thy folded hands beseeching light,
A temple-lamp of kingliness
Revealed in birth's tremendous plight.

A symbol journey through a realm of tears,
The dark oppressive weight of life,
That greets the soul new-born in flesh,
While the dust of all infinity
Lies scattered on thy God-like feet;
Though speechless bringing forth the realms of sound,
And breathing gently in the sombre night,
One with the silent things of earth.

Night child, faint cries bespeak they presence,
While motionless in dreams thou liest
Still grasping memories of pregnant worlds
Seen now through lids that still to earth are closed

Frail wanderings through timeless groves of sleep
To wake in matter's stone-like trance,
To work, to mould the argent limbs divine
And clutch at stars that once were thine.

In stillness enter, to stillness return,
To cradle thought's organic harmonies,
Plastic energies moulding godhead's forms
In the dense and crowded jungle of our days.

Pale frame wherein Divinity rests,
Pale hands that hold the magic key of life
And eyes that through eternity have held
The radiance of the deathless spheres of God.

Arise, O Splendour, thrice-crowned Man, awake,
And dwell at the petals of Her Feet.

Note on the poem Night Child - written on the evening of the
birth of a child of the tea-stall man across from
Promesse, Auroville.
In a squalid hut made of palm fronds and casuarina posts the
wife of the Tea stall man' gave birth to a tiny child, a
girl, in the darkness lit only by the glow of a kerosene lamp, on
a pounded dirt floor. Not a son, for whom the
father's pride would shine throughout the village, but a
daughter. And in this dark hovel, these sordid human
conditions, I entered as friend and guest. I looked into their jet
black eyes, luminous with joy and wonder as they
lovingly presented the child to me, marvelling again at the
miracle of birth and their warmth and tenderness.