What Celtic blood did flow in your veins
Oh sister! What genes did it carry?
From unbridled spring or holy fountain
Of the divine land that knows no worry.
What force that enthused you to cross
Several seas and come to this land
Seeking the Master, the Swami, the ultimate boss-
Whose spirit did drag you from Ireland?
Yes, it’s the Swami’s divine words you heard
At Westend’s cold afternoon in London
That crux of Vedanta seeking transcendental Third-
The Self – above the mind or sense it’s position.
You sought your Guru, and you got one;
Divine providence brought you to Bharata
The land of the rishis who taught renunciation
And you renounced everything to embrace the Maata.
Maata- the Mother- became the land of yours
Where your divine spirit dragged the youth
To unshackle the fetters of the teeming crores
Of Indians, reeling in bonds of servitude.
You embraced every Indian as your brother,
Your sister, daughter or your son,
You treated them in plague or nation’s disaster
As your own siblings in convulsion.
Your first school for the girls at Calcutta’s edge
Was a flicker that opened the woman’s mind
Of your Mother India and set up the stage
To export her brains to the globe’s other side.
What unrestrained knowledge did you imbibe
In the artistic brains of the painters then?
That today Bengal School of Art still thrive
In the artistic space, with painters of new gen.
What spiritual force did your guru imbue
That lashed the nation out of slumber?
What holy blessings did your parents bestow
To be in one -a sister, a friend and a mother?
Let this humble poet bow down to thee
Like the world stoops to the sages,
As no school, no college no university
Can teach your ethos in the printed page.
# (published in Metverse Muse-Golden Jubilee Issue)
