You’re invited to the
West Coast Tagore Festival
September 5th and 6th 2014
Richmond, British Columbia
Carla Shafer, friend and host to Bellingham’s Chuckanut Sandstone Writers Theater, and I have been invited to read poems at this event.
Last year I was moved by the presentation of Rabindranath Tagore’s life, (b. 7 May 1861 – d. 7 August 1941). The festival is a colorful gathering of true Tagore followers. A real treasure for the NW.
“…sobriquet Gurudev,δ[›]was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its “profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse”,[3] he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913.[4] In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his “elegant prose and magical poetry” remain largely unknown outside Bengal.”
THE GIFT
A poem by Rabindranath Tagore
I want to give you something, my child, for we are drifting in the
stream of the world.
Our lives will be carried apart, and our love forgotten.
But I am not so foolish as to hope that I could buy your heart
with my gifts.
Young is your life, your path long, and you drink the love we
bring you at one draught and turn and run away from us.
You have your play and your playmates. What harm is there if
you have no time or thought for us!
We, indeed, have leisure enough in old age to count the days
that are past, to cherish in our hearts what our hands have lost
for ever.
The river runs swift with a song, breaking through all
barriers. But the mountain stays and remembers, and follows her
with his love.
***
shannon p. laws 