The Woman and the Dream

I will love you as my own,
I will love you if I find you alone.
Why keep me far?
Draw me close—
I can drift, longing,
through seas of blood, through wars,
carrying the dead far away,
through mire, tears, and sweat,
through life itself,
barefoot over barbed wire
toward the city of civilization.
 
I can paint with dreams
until my eyes are full—
even in heaps of rotting waste
I can kneel in devotion,
in deep worship of the Divine,
seeking the path of justice,
my chest swelling with pride.
 
In the stillness, in solitude,
love grows;
wrinkles deepen with age,
and the pain of parting
fades, slowly, slowly.
 
You can give love—
love even in my death-pain,
when my eyes hold a bloodless fear
and evening falls in the month of Shravan.
In my destitute chest, reverence rises.
 
In the storm-stream of Kalboishakhi,
rain-wet women call—
my skin thrills with awareness.
Who comes, who takes me?
Whose am I?
 
I seek the doorway in the worm-eaten door
of a householder’s wall;
the road ends
in some unknown corner of society.
In the courtyard, dust
whirls in spirals.
 
Whose hand do I hold
as I walk?
What invisible gust has come
to the naked shore of the sea—
the unstoppable helmsman
of a sail-torn boat?
 
In the leaf-hut of the world,
by the tulsi altar of the evening lamp—
you are like a dream,
O woman.