One in Many New

You have made me known to friends
not known earlier, and given me seats
in homes not my own, bringing the distant
near and making a brother of a stranger.

Yet, I am edgy at heart to leave the familiar
shelter due to my forgetting that the old
abides in the new, and the new was there
in the old, and you will never desert me.

Through birth and death, in this world
or in other, wherever you lead me, it is you
the same, the one companion of my endless life
linking the unfamiliar with a heart filled with joy.

When I know you, then, none I call alien
or,  with that gen, I find, no door is ever shut;
grant me ever, therefore, the bliss that comes
from the touch of that one in the play of many.

Adopted from Tagore’s Gitanjali, poem 63

Henry Victor          25.10.2012