My Life I live not from hour to hour But in dream on dream of you, Sweet! The dawn is the ten-petalled flower Of your holy feet. I am told that midday appears, But the perfect globe of noon Is made from the hemispheres Of your breasts where shadows swoon. I hark to a rumour of even, But all that I know are your eyes Drooping their gleams of heaven To the deep where the child earth lies. I have heard of an hour that is night; O how should I tell, when I see Nothing but your hair's hidden light Break loose its mystery? All time is the shine of your shape, All space is the stretch of your soul; W

The Eternal Vast Sunk in a gulf that seems to reach no close, Winged to a mountain climbing without end, Stretched till the heart has grown horizonless, We touch the Vast of the supracosmic Self. Night is not there, nor day; yet both lie dense For ever in a mighty measureless mood Coloured with That for which no word is born— A night where frozen is all mortal sound, A day that burns up every tongue of time! But though the earth-cry shrivels and falls away And human gaze is buried by the mass Of an infinite sun no sky can utter forth, A salamander of omniscient sleep Is laughing and dancing in the invisible blaze.

O Pygmy of Perfection!... When will I break through this blind stone of a breast? O warrior light caverned in my small heart, O dwarf with the hatchet forged in holy fire, Lift thy edged ecstasy and drive through clay The mystic fissure of a luminous laugh Answering the golden infinite of God's love! O pygmy of perfection, leap beyond To thy full stature of bliss that knows no birth! Then from the overarched eternities Come back time's king to trample the gilded roof Of the arrogant mind of me and plunge through thought With the cry of a thousand oceans pouring down Deep after deep of an inexhaustible truth! B

Above, Within This hour of dusk Thrills in my heart a cry for precious things: How wilt thou please, O life with so small wings, O thou great heap of straw and a grain of musk? Over me reigns The empire of a superhuman sleep Precious with secret plenitudes that keep A teeming twinkling infinite of musk-grains! Breathes far away That mystery measureless above all time. Will ever the Vast wake even here a chime Of heavenly gold transmuting common day? Heart within heart— Calls a wide garden sown in a mirrored sky, Deep day of some divine world-soul with eye On blossoming eye, dream-single though apart! O

Great Wings Great wings, one white and one of gold Our dreaming spirit must unfold, The wing of shadowless purity, The wing of power that cannot die. But life gains not this liberty Unless a wideness ever free Is the formless depth of what we are, A mystery standing near and far, An omnipresence of rapt air, No need to rush forth anywhere, An all-supporting breakless peace That makes the soul of form release Wings beyond earthly nights and days, And bears with cool invisible grace Their waft of gold-white victory: Godhead is only godhead by A soar of Self within Self-space. 9-6-48 Page-67

THE ADVENTURE OF THE APOCALYPSE The Adventure of the Apocalypse K. D. SETHNA SRI AUROBINDO CIRCLE BOMBAY First published in 1949 by Sri Aurobindo Circle, 32 Rampart Row, Fort, Bombay 1 Printed in India at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry All Rights Reserved 154/49/500

-075_God^s whole secret.htm God's Whole Secret The strokes of time have left no scar on her: Death after death upbuilt a fairer face: Now God's whole secret buried within earth Laughs in the two sunflowers of her gaze. Out of a heaven haloing each hour She wakes the truth-gold in our limbs of lust: Intense with a glowing absolute of life She brings even dust the glory of being dust . 10-7-48 Page-105

Mirror and Knowledge All mirrors in which we seek the bliss Of our small self are an abyss At the bottom of whose night Is a mockery of light, A tiny stagnant pool Where darkles the flattened face, With gaping empty gaze, Of the demon and the ghoul. But when the Great Self glows Like a golden cosmic rose, The petals fanning out from one sweet core, No strangeness anywhere Remains for stare and stare Seeking to itself a door The central Eye of eyes Can shut in all-repose, For the Great Flower knows Its perfume of paradise. 9-5-48 Page-2

Let the Ear Read Read not with eye alone, Let the ear read: Then shall you see the lines Of rhythmic speed Gather and curve to form Bodies of gold— A glory that can never To the eye unfold Unless a hush, intent With wondering, Hears that unearthly sweetness Goldenly ring! Sight is the surface mind, Sound the deep heart: Until you catch in the poet's Magical art The throb and thrill and throe. Of this profound, The gods of unbearable beauty Are never found. Not when the brain goes dreaming, But when we kiss A night unknown and the heart Breaks with blind bliss,

Hidden Apocalypt Not the cool mind blinking with a million eyes But the hungry heart that struggles to see once With as intense a sight as its blindness now, Is the blaze that catches time and eternity. All things in a single glow suddenly break To an infinite harmony in the human breast: When the heart's hidden apocalypt cracks his cave Vision is no delight of heavens hung far— To see is to devour divinity! Through one great gaze the whole universe of truth Is drawn within by a tyranny of love That brooks no distance betwixt seer and seen. Colour becomes a laugh of inmost life— Red rapture, blue bliss, yellow ecstasy