". . .CHITTO JETHA BHAYASHUNYO. . ."
( WHERE THE MIND IS WITHOUT FEAR )

breath & sax
unite to form
a creature made of flesh & horn

his sax calls forth
his own ghost
it dances before him like smoke

he closes his eyes
loses sight of everything
but the song

he plays
not knowing what he plays
until he plays it

the song seems to know
where it's going
it's the man it improvises

"...where the world has not
been broken up
into fragments..."

he longs to be taken
out of himself
so he can become himself

the last note
he comes back from the nowhere
that he's found

stuck now in this
somewhere he is
made ordinary again

now he's just
a man with a limp
just another drunk

his sax
the genie of sound
sound asleep in its case

he hums inside his head
the music heard
he the instrument now

tapping on the table
his cigarette dancing
to the invisible music

the notes
half man half ghost
tapped inside his skull

even the silence
now
full of sound

"...sometimes I wish
the music would leave
me alone..."

"...the music is like
a very very big dog
taking its owner for a walk.."

"...note by note I am
transformed
until I am the music..."

"...caught in a riptide
what can I
do. . ?"

*

And in Tagore's own translation, from the 1912 English edition of Gitanjali.

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father let my country awake"