Poem of the Day » yogananda

When I cast all Dreams Away

Tejvan Pettinger — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 21:27:52 +0000

I sipped the sap of each sane pleasure;
I exulted in the crushed beauty of sextillion stars;
I made a bonfire of all sorrows and basked in the glory blaze;
I quaffed the questing love of all hearts;
I mingled paternal, maternal, and fraternal love together,
And drank the solacing draught;
I squeezed the scriptures for drops of peace;
I wrung poems from the winepress of Nature;
I lifted gems from the mine of thoughts;
I stole the sweetness from the honeycomb of innocent joys;
I read, I smiled, I worked, I planned, I throbbed, I aspired;
But naught was sufficient.
Only nightmares of incompleteness,
Ever receding will-o’-the wisps of promised happiness,
Haunted and hastened my heart.
But when I cast all dreams away,
I found the deep sanctuary of peace,
And my soul sang: “God alone! God alone!”

- Paramahanasa Yogananda

Undying Beauty

Tejvan Pettinger — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:14:51 +0000

They did their best
And they are blest-
The sap, the shoots,
The little leaves and roots;
The benign breath,
The touch of light –
All worked in amity
To grow the rose’s beauty.
Watch its splendour,
Its undying grandeur,
The Infinite Face
That peeps through its little case.
Watch not in grief
Its falling petals or its brief
Sojourn here;
For its career
Done, its duty ends;
Toward the Immortal’s home it tends.
The sap dried,
The summer petals fled,
Its body pines;
Yet its death’s divine;
Through the death it spurns
Its deathless glory’s won;
The rose is dead –
Its beauty lives instead.

- P.Yogananda

What is Love? P.Yogananda

Tejvan Pettinger — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:58:37 +0000

Love is the scent with the lotus born.

It is the silent choirs of petals

Singing the winter’s harmony of uniform beauty.

Love is the song of the soul, singing to God.

It is the balanced rhythmic dance of planets -

sun and moon lit

In the skyey hall festooned with fleecy clouds –

Around the sovereign Silent Will.

It is the thirst of the rose to drink the sunrays

And blush red with life.

‘Tis the promptings of the mother earth

To feed her milk to the tender, thirsty roots,

And to nurse all life.

It is the urge of the sun

To keep all things alive.

Love is the unseen craving of the Mother Divine

That took the protecting father–form,

And that feeds helpless mouths

With milk of mother’s tenderness.

It is the babies’ sweetness,

Coaxing the rain of parental sympathy

To shower upon them.

It is the lover’s unenslaved surrender to the beloved

To serve and solace.

It is the elixir of friendship,

Reviving broken and bruised souls.

It is the martyr’s zeal to shed his blood

For the well-beloved fatherland.

It is the ineffable, silent call of the heart to another
heart.

It is the God-drunk poet’s heartaches

For every creature’s groans.

Love is to enjoy the family rose of petal-beings,

And thence to move to spacious fields -

Passing by portals of social, national, international
sympathy,

On to the limitless Cosmic Home –

To gaze with looks of wonderment,

And to serve all that lives, still or moving.

This is to know what love is.

He knows who lives it.

Love is evolution’s ameliorative call

To the far-strayed sons

To return to Perfection’s home.

It is the call of the beauty – robed ones

To worship the great Beauty.

It is the call of God

Through silent intelligences

And starburst of feelings.

Love is the Heaven

Toward which the flowers, rivers, nations, atoms,
creatures – you and I

Are rushing by the straight path of action right,

Or winding laboriously on error’s path,

All to reach haven there at last.

- Paramahansa Yoganada

From: Songs of the Soul