To arrange words

Tukaram

Listen

To arrange words
In some order
Is not the same thing
As the inner poise
That’s poetry

The truth of poetry
Is the truth
Of being.
It’s an experience
Of truth.

No ornaments
Survive
A crucible.
Fire reveals
Only molten
Gold.

Says Tuka
We are here
To reveal.
We do not waste
Words.

[Translated from the Marathi by Dilip Chitre]

He really doesn’t waste words, does he? Here it is, the creed of the poet distilled down to its very basics; the poem allowed no more than a single image, one that melts effortlessly back into its principle; the confounding of purity with simplicity to arrive at the gleaming metal of the truth.

[falstaff]

P.S. More about Tukaram – a seventeenth century Marathi saint-poet, part of the Bhakti movement, here and here. Today’s poem comes from Says Tuka (Penguin India, 1991)