Fireflies 169 - 176 [German translation]

169

Beauty smiles in the confinement of the bud,

in the heart of a sweet incompleteness.

170

Your flitting love lightly brushed with its wings

my sun-flower

and never asked if it was ready to surrender its honey.

171

Leaves are silences

around flowers which are their words.

172

The tree bears its thousand years

as one large majestic moment.

173

My offerings are not for the temple at the end of the road,

but for the wayside shrines

that surprise me at every bend.

174

Your smile, my love, like the smell of a strange flower,

is simple and inexplicable.

175

Death laughs when the merit of the dead is exaggerated

for it swells his store with more than he can claim.

176

The sigh of the shore follows in vain

the breeze that hastens the ship across the sea.

• Artist:Rabindranath Tagore