Poetry & Shayari

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,

some momentary awareness comes

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

Come, come, whoever you are.

Wanderer, worshiper, lover of leaving.

It doesn't matter.

Ours is not a caravan of despair.

Come, even if you have broken your vows a thousand times.

Come, yet again, come, come.

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu

Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not from any religion

or cultural system.

I am not from the East or the West,

not out of the ocean or up from the ground,

not natural or ethereal, not composed

of elements at all.

I belong to the Beloved, have seen the two worlds as one

and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

Love is the water of life.

Drink it down, let it drown you.

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you, not knowing

how blind that was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They're in each other all along.

Out beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language, even the phrase each other does not make any sense.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy's been swinging them.

But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

Hope is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -

And sore must be the storm -

That could abash the little Bird

That kept so many warm -

Because I could not stop for Death -

He kindly stopped for me -

The Carriage held but just Ourselves -

And Immortality.

We slowly drove - He knew no haste

And I had put away

My labor and my leisure too,

For His Civility -

I taste a liquor never brewed -

From Tankards scooped in Pearl -

Not all the Vintners of the Summer

Could intoxicate me so -

Inebriate of Air - am I -

And Debauchee of Dew -

Reeling - through endless summer days -

From inns of Molten Blue -

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

Those dying generations - at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

I have met them at close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses,

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

I went down to the river,

I set down on the bank.

I tried to think but could not,

So I jumped in and sank.

Life is fine!

Fine as wine!

Life is fine!

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I will be at the table

When company comes.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments

by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way

into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

Where dost thou stand behind them all, my lover,

hidden in the shadows of their successive masks?

Seeking me in dark corners they do not know that

I am with them all.

The sleep that flits on baby's eyes - does anybody know where it was born?

It is faint like the yellow moonlight in a thin cloud,

It smells like a half-blown jasmine flower in the dusk.

It has a shadow that dances on the cradle leaves.