Sy asked me to introduce these poems by talking about my guru, but I don’t like talking about my guru, Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. I already wrote a whole book about traveling to him last year. Born Too Young, it’s called — about how we’re all born too soon, too stupid. I’m thirty-five, old enough to be in the White House, and I’m still so thick you could use me for a pasta machine.

“I enjoy writing translations — it’s like making poems I’d never write otherwise,” someone at Violet’s poetry reading said last night.

And providentially, I too feel that in these translations I’m writing sweet, sweeter than a New Yorker can commonly be.

My guru, who founded the Ananda Marga Society, gives out little milk sugar pellets, or rather others bring them and he blesses them.

Sometimes it’s too sweet, Ananda Marga, but there’s also plenty of work to do. Ananda Marga’s role is to “serve the suffering humanity.”

 

He’s a Bengali — real name P.R. Sarkar. In 1981, he started writing these songs, “Prabhat Samgiita” (“Songs Of Dawn”). These aren’t true translations — they’re poems based on the songs. (Ten weeks in Calcutta taught me to count to two in Bengali. He has more than three thousand of these, I think.)

Why do they come out in the shape of popsicle sticks, I wonder?

Many of my poems are thin these days. I’m thin; maybe that contributes.

I hate to bore people. I know that’s part of it.

This way you can line them up like standing lamps in a showroom, and fit more on a page.

Or surround them with white light, like yogis are.

— Sparrow

 

1041
In
all
I
hear
and
think
I see you.

You
move
heaven and
hell,
mountains
and
caves,
jewel of mine.

Love,
I know,
repels
logic.

Love
is greater
than
liberation.

That pleasure!

I’ll
do
anything
for you.

That pleasure!

I
had
never
understood.
1048
Who
is
singing
at
this
strange
hour?

Who
is
flute
playing
in
sweet
pain?

Someone
knows no
time

breaks
all rules

and
draws
hearts
with this
torment.

We
met at
dawn.

Slowly
our meeting
grew
into love.

Space
and time
were
gone.

Only love.

We
rose into
heaven

floated in
heaven.
1340
Bricks
in a
heap.

My
mind
is down
a
spooky
well.

I
can’t
see
the
green
in
grass

or
the
pretty
lines
leaves
make.

What
can I
do
when
I’m this
lonely?

Humans
hum
down
the street
thinking
make
money
make
money
make
money.

They
know so
many
games
and so
few
moves.
922
You
are a
jewel
in water,
a
light
in night.

I
do not
know
your
face.

Still
you love.

Hope
floods me
when
I am
angry
with fate.

You
enter my heart
with honey.

I want
nothing
of you.

I
have
a piece
of
your gift.

What
you have
given
you have
given.

Send
me more
work.