Separated by a century I reply to a poem....
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.
Open your doors and look abroad.
From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories 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.
(RabindranathTagore, The Gardener, 1915)
A reader replies
Great bard of Bengal, now almost one hundred years since those lines,
I, your reader, descendant of the Raj that you despised, living in a world so different to your day,
read of your garden. My heart leaps!
I fling wide my garden door. The flowers, bright birdsong and fragrances speak now as they spoke in living joy
that still rises with the sap and sings of divinity in subtle colours, so pale. My spring morning:
that same elation from floral memories and golden clouds.
(John Butterfield 2012)
