Читать книгу «Жизнь – это царь» и другие стихотворения - - Страница 6

Lean, strenuous, resolute,

He passed His days

Trudging in dust-stained clouts the forest paths;

Stood as a beggar at the beggar’s door

For alms, and more than kingly, spoke with kings.

Only when blue-black elephants of heaven

With bellowings filled the vast plains of the sky

Sat He aloof, and listened, heart at ease,

To the soft thunder of the rain on leaves.

Else was He as the sun unwearying

Full five-and-forty years, and as the sun

Shed upon all the beams of truth and peace.

This did He out of love for all that lives.

They carved Him out of sandal, chipped from stone

The Ever-moving, cast in rigid bronze Him

Who was Life itself, and made Him sit,

Hands idly folded, for a thousand years Immobile in the incensed image-house;

They gilded Him till He was sick with gold.

And underneath the shadow of the shrine

They sauntered in their yellow silken robes,

Or – lolled replete on purple-cushioned thrones –

In sleepy stanzas droned His vigorous words

To gentle flutterings of jewelled fans…

Arise, O Lord, and with Thy dust-stained feet

Walk not the roads of India but the world!

Shake from the slumber of a thousand years

Thy dream-mazed fold!

Burn as a Fire for men!