Rabindranath Tagore - Unending Love

art Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in
numberless forms, numberless times,
in life after life, in age after age forever.

My spell-bound heart has made and
remade the necklace of songs
that you take as your gift,
wear round your neck in your many forms
in life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love,its age-old pain,
its ancient tale of being apart or together,
as I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:
you become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
at the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
shy sweetness of meeting,
the same distressful tears of farewell– old love,
but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at you , it has found its end in you,
the love of all lover’s days both past and forever:
universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
the memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours–

and the songs of every poet past and forever.