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

A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-fourth Week in Ordinary Time, by Kerry Weber
Kerry WeberSeptember 22, 2023
“The exploitation of migrants is criminal” as is their detention, Pope Francis told reporters in August, and “I am going to Marseille for this.”
How Catholic Charities’ mission and Catholic identity is informing their work on the ground.
JesuiticalSeptember 22, 2023