The years of your existence are unending.
The years of your unresting are forever.
The sun, who is desire, ever begets in you his passion,
And the moon is ever drawing you, with silvery soft alluring,
To surge and sway, to wander and fret, to waste yourself in foam.
So Buddha-calm shall never descend upon you.
And tho it may often seem you have found the Way,
Your tempest-sins return and quicken to wild reincarnations,
And again great life, pulsing and perilous,
Omnipotent life, that ever resurges thro the universe,
Lashes you back to striving, back to yearning, back to speech.
To utterance on all shores of the world
Of things unutterable.
Give over then, you never shall reach Nirvana!
Nor I, who am your acolyte for a moment;
Who swing a censer of fragrant words before your priestly feet,
That tread these altar-rocks, bedraped with weeds gently afloat,
And with the wild flutter of gulls wildly mysterious.
Give over and call your winds again to join you!
O chanter of deep enchantments, of uncharted litanies,
Call them and bid them say with you that life transcends retreat,
And that, in the temple of its Immanence,
There is no peace that does not spring daily from peacelessness,
And no Nirvana save in the lee of storm.
THE NUN
A lone palm leans in the moonlight,
Over a convent wall.
The sea below is waking and breaking
With a calm heave and fall.
A young nun sits at a window;
For Heaven she is too fair;
Yet even the dove of God might nest
In her bosom beating there.
A lone ship sails from the harbour:
Whom does it bear away?
Her lover who, sin-hearted, has parted
And left her but to pray?
She has no lover, nor ever
Has heard afar love's sigh.
Only the Convent's vesper vow
Has ever dimmed her eye.
For naught knows she of her beauty,
More than the palm of its peace:
And none shall cross her portal, to mortal
Desires to bend her knees.
The ways of the world have flowers,
And any who will pluck those;
But in His hand, against all harm,
God still will keep some rose.