KD Sethna (Amal Kiran)
Let me not utter five things in five words,
But by one word of densest diamond
Pack five things to a shining secrecy
That gathers a deep truth missed by them all;
Or else with five words capture one sole thing,
Pluck from it fires that light up earth’s abysm—
Fires that were veiled by being locked together,
But now a fourfold seizure from without
Of splendours and terrors ruling time and space
And then a sudden self-sight, a fifth flame
That knows by a sheer eternity within…
Words have not come to measure things that are;
They plunge to the unheard, leap to the unseen,
Bring ear and eye a chaos of surprise
Till through a dark delight of consciousness
Huge nebulas swirl our dream-distances,
Stretching the soul to rapt infinity!...
Words are the shadows of enhaloed hawks:
The shadows cling to clay and seem clay-born,
But he who marks their moving mystery
Feels how a strange spontaneous quiver wings
Their passage here and how intangible
They float for all their close and massive shapes.
Alone the poet looks up to the Inane,
Sees the gold wanderers of the boundless blue,
Catches the radiant rhythms each burning heart
Puts forth in every line of the wide form
Spanning the silences with pinion-song.
Thus in this scheme of shades from the vast throng
Haunting the earth-mind he shows across brief thought
Glimmers immortal, throbbings of the bliss
That reels through heaven a drunkard of Truth’s sun.
Or, in rare moments quick with dawn and noon
And eve at once, our little human dreams
Love with such far-flung eyes the dying birds
That the large lusts comes swooping down for prey
And, where the shadows mystically shone,
Falls—crushing, piercing, ravishing every sense—
The living body and beauty and blaze of God!
3 June 1948
Source: The Secret
Splendour, pp. 276-77
Amal himself writes about this piece the following: “One
of my own pets. I still remember the thrill that ran through my whole body when
I wrote the end of the concluding paragraph.” (Mother India, February 1994)
Oh yes! Words are shadows of enhaloed hawks—we chase the
shadows and see not the blue-and-gold wingers of the upper sky, flying in the
unseen and the unheard, in the beyond of the topaz realms. We analytically try
to weigh the contents and live not the realities they embody. The
truth-audition and the truth-sense is the thing that must be felt and experienced,
their native wonder, and it is that which we must endeavour to receive from
them. That only means, we doing unceasingly the tapas of the word, the askesis
of the speech, vāgyajna, doing it in the deep silence of the
creative-expressive soul.
The Word
RY Deshpande
The Word was broken up into four quarters,
And the articulate voice flowed in the streams,
And the seeing sound pierced the hill of substance,
And Agni took Speech for his glowing bride.
Therefore the tongues of fire eat the honey-food.
Then in a vast of silence where no thought moves
Was felt the first stress, the primal urge to be,
And the Ineffable burst in a song of creation,
As if in dense spaces of spiritual light
Exploded the supernova, a golden mass of joy.
The Word was spoken and the Vedas were born,
And the seeds sprang up in richnesses of the earth,
And dissolved in waters it became the fish,
And borne by the breath it filled the mid-region.
The upward trajectory of the loud hymn took wings
And again the Word reached the unseen sky of delight.
Then mounted the flames of sacrifice to Heaven
And All-Grace leaned down in body of the Word.
11 May 1984
Source: The
And here is
En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai
theos en ho logos
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
And the Word in the beginning was with God. All things were made by him; and without him was
not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the
light shone in the night and the night comprehended it not. There was the true Light, which lights every man that comes into the world. He was in the world,
and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own,
and his own received him not. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. Then said they unto him, Who art thou? that we may give an answer to them that sent us.
What sayest thou of thyself? He said, I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
Make straight the way of the Lord. And John asserted, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it abode upon him.
And I knew him not. And I saw, and bare record that this is the Son of God.
NB: This article was prompted by Rich’s The Origin of the Words at