from Recovery – poem no.10 from arogya by Rabindranath Tagore (1941)

Lazily afloat on time’s stream,

My mind turns to the sky.

As I cross its empty expanses

Shadowy pictures form in my eyes

Of the many ages of the long past

And the many peoples

That have hurtled forward,

Confident of victory.

…

But the earth when I look at it

Makes me aware

Of the hubbub of a huge concourse

Of ordinary people

Led along many paths and in various groups

By man’s common urges,

From age to age, through life and death.

…

They work –

In cities and in fields.

Imperial canopies collapse,

Battle-drums stop,

Victory-pillars, like idiots, forget what their own words mean;

Battle-crazed eyes and blood-smeared weapons

Live on only in children’s stories,

Their menace veiled.

But people work –

Here and in other regions,

…

Filling the passage of their lives with a rumbling and thundering

Woven by day and by night –

The sonorous rhythm

Of Life’s liturgy in all its pain and elation,

Gloom and light.

Over the ruins of hundreds of empires,

The people work.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

Translated from the Bengali by William Radice (b. 1951)

The full poem and others available in Rabindranath Tagore Selected Poems, Penguin Classics (1985)