poem of the day

and as we talk about serendipitous discoveries, here's another that brought forth the poem of today:

i've been meaning to read tagore's gitanjali (cover to cover) for a while now. last evening, when i finally got it off my bookshelf and turned the pages, i found an old, folded print-out of a poem. it seemed vaguely familiar (these days most things are only as much as that *sigh*), and i tried hard to jog my memory further. this is as far as i got:

many years ago, a few of us had attempted to start a poetry reading club. it never really took off, though we exchanged numerous emails :). we did hold one meeting where we each brought in a poem we wished to share. i don't remember much from this meeting, not even the poem that i brought in. i do however recall that a hadn't brought in a poem. being a fan of tagore, he went to my poetry collection and picked out gitanjali to share a few verses from it. the folded print-out i found yesterday had been left there by him. it was his copy of a poem that one of us had shared that day. if only i could remember who... but this is as far as my memory goes. not entirely unfortunate though, for i feel blessed to be able to discover this beautiful poem a second time. a failing memory has its pros, undoubtedly :).

The Makers
- Howard Nemerov

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

what a moving tribute it is, is it not? to the makers of yesterday whose contributions we so oft fail to recognize. where would we be without them? selfless and nameless giving has far-reaching impact indeed.