Bhagavad Gita Rubaiyat, part II

2:14
Sensations that the mind takes by default
as absolute decrees it must exalt—
the heat or cold, the pleasure, pain—are but
suggestions. Take them with a grain of salt.

2:22
This overcoat of clay that you must don,
to clothe the spirit while from heav’n you’re gone,
must one day be hung back upon its hook,
but though you change attire, You still live on.

2:23-25
The soul in water is unsinkable,
by earthly chains it is unlinkable,
unburnable by fire, immune from harm,
and even, to the mind, unthinkable.

Bhagavad Gita Rubaiyat, part I

2:10
When worries gather, pile upon pile,
and rocky roads stretch mile after mile,
if then my heart but turns unto the Lord,
I feel His secret smile, smile, smile.

2:16
There’s no such thing as Unreality,
and what is Real can never cease to be.
Therefore, Arjuna, in your wisdom know
the true and infinite Finality.

2:19
Ignorant they, who the world’s deceived,
whose lamentations cry to be believed.
None there are who fight, are slain, or slay,
but all are one, and in the Light conceived.

Music to End a Drought

There is a symphony outside,
and through my window I can hear
the music as if amplified
by years of silent skies too clear.
Lashing branches clap their hands,
while leaves, appreciative, applaud.
Long seated, Earth’s ovation stands,
but none attending find it odd
that, silent and unmoving there,
the ground weeps softly in her chair.

Bad Advice

by Grigoriy Oster

translated from the Russian by Tandava

You ask a stupid question,
you get a stupid answer.
So if one is in your head,
pirouetting like a dancer,
just evict it from your brain
and ask it of your father.
Let his mind spin and swirl
with all that boil and bother.


[Original:]

Вредные советы

Никогда вопросов глупых
Сам себе не задавай,
А не то еще глупее
Ты найдешь на них ответ
Если глупые вопросы
Появились в голове,
Задавай их сразу взрослым.
Пусть у них трещат мозги.

[after Pablo Neruda]

“Once again my words / turn to the waves.”
—Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Waves”

I took inspiration, once,
from the sea, and once again
from the sky, my
poems, my words
offered back to them in turn,
shyly, humbly, hoping merely to
see, if only from afar, the
muse as she turns, and waves.

Krishna’s Tritina

based on three words from a random word generator

I have no opposite.
In Me all things expand
in joyful abandon.

Seek to abandon
all that is opposite
to your will to expand,

then grow, reach, expand
until you are abandoned
by Delusion into its opposite.

The opposite of abandonment is expansion.

Tritina on a Tragedy of Toast

based on three words from a random word generator

The case has been established:
There has been a death
here, a man who was once the toast

of the town, is now just toast.
And this establishment
was the scene of his death:

an all-night diner, in which death
lurked among the eggs and toast,
in its poisonous patience established.

We have established that the cause of death was toast.