Timeless Renewal
Vincent Van Gogh, Daubigny’s Garden
The Gardener 85
By Rabindranath Tagore
Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence?
I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring,
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
one single streak of gold from yonder clouds.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories
of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before.
In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang
one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
one spring morning, sending its glad voice across an hundred years.
Timeless Renewal
Rabindranath Tagore calls out to us across a century to open our doors and to see what he sees: flowers in bloom, a sunlit sky. His poem suggests a certain human connectivity, no matter the passage of time, in the immediate pleasure of nature’s beauty. Something I felt to see in a photo of my young grandmother holding a frothy bouquet of chrysanthemums.
Does a particular aspect of nature evoke a memory for you, of a distant person, place, or time?
