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Beyond
Land and Time |
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Suchetana (Sucetônā) Translated by Joe Winter Suchetana, you are a distant island near the Evening
Star; you are in the
midst of a cinnamon forest; solitude is where you are. This world’s wars-of-blood,
its winnings are its truth; but at the last not true. still my heart is with you. Today as my life in
harsh sunshine journeys here and
there with love filled for the world’s
human race as itself indeed— I have seen these
lying killed by my own hand
perhaps—brother, sister, friend,
neighbour—deep now, deeper yet is the sickness
that has the world in its hold . . . still the world has the race in its debt. Often I have seen a
ship gain our harbour’s sunshine carrying the harvest-crop. That grain is the
untold corpses of mankind: a marvel of gold
spreading up from these, as
Buddha, as Confucius, strikes dumb our fathers’
hearts, ours too; but still from all sides
work’s blood-tiring call summons us to come. Suchetana, lighting the way on which the world’s-freedom comes slow, the work of many a
century’s many a noble mind— how radiant is this breeze with the sun’s
rays!— almost as fine a
gathering of mankind, with the skill of
tired tireless sailors like ourselves, we shall build—not today—for a far last
morning to find. Drawn to the
Earth’s ground, to the house of human birth I have come, and I
feel, better not to have been born— yet having come all
this I see as a deeper gain when I touch a body of dew in an
incandescent dawn. I know what’s gone,
what’s not to come, what before the race lies— on the face of forever night all is an
infinite sunrise.
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