“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.”
Rabindra Nath Tagore

Time was when I was very young
and the world an unrolled carpet. A runner
to infinity, just as all the long straight roads
reveal themselves with every tread.

Yet I desired the sinuous course
beguiled by every half seen thing
beyond each baited bend. And year by year
went wandering, a wayward, windblown,
tumbleweed thing, stumbling midlife
upon you there, in a Central London square. 

Just your head on a marble plinth, a bearded bronze
besides a beech. Copper-leaved with mammoth trunk
so smooth, and grey as elephant. Pachyderms of course
you knew and this square too, and English enough
to take Bengali from your tongue
to let us hear your poetry:-

“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure.
This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again,
and fillest it ever with fresh life”…²

You're still filled with infinite gifts
I'm now brushed by butterfly wings

1. Gordon Square is close to the faculty of law at University College London, where Tagore was a student in 1878.   ↩︎
2. from Gitanjali ↩︎

For Open Link Night at dVerse where anything goes as long as it’s poetry. Punam has given us an optional prompt from Rabindra Nath Tagore but I’ve opted for one from his ‘Poems on Time’ as epigraph.