Loading...
Loading...
Click here if you don’t see subscription options
Amit MajmudarDecember 23, 2014
I never saw the root of the real
In arboreal flare,
Nor witnessed this man walk on water,
Nor that one float in air.
 
I sat beneath the bodhi tree;
I felt my body itch.
Between the true cup and the false
I knew not which was which.
 
My eyes have never blown like fuses
Sparked black upon a wall,
No surge of sight or insight mine,
No whisper, and no call.
 
My thousand suns have been my twins,
My Beatrice, my wife,
My way to immortality
The living of the life—
 
No visage singed into a shroud
Or knotted in a tree.
A newborn in a swaddling-cloth
Was the vision given me:
 
Someday the faces round my sickbed
Will blur and superimpose
Into that single human Face
The visionaries know,
 
My humble human loves collected
And, for the first time, seen
Intensely, like diffraction
Narrowed to a beam.
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.

The latest from america

Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez was one of several community leaders who joined to open the Family Assistance Program, aiding those affected by recent ICE raids.
On Friday, Pope Leo XIV issued a statement on the theme "Migrants, missionaries of hope."
In Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” an ordinary electrician has a transcendent encounter—with U.F.O.s, not God.
John DoughertyJuly 25, 2025
A pair of hands opening a thick paperpack book. (iStock/LeoPatrizi)
Many of my acquaintances have given up “reading about something that didn't happen.” But fiction has long-term and concrete value, both mentally and socially.
Cam HealyJuly 25, 2025