HIS
FLAME-MAGNIFICENT FACE
O flame magnificent face of monarch-sun,
A living eternity of puissance and poise,
What words can mirror thy deathlessness august?
What voice can sing thy far unthinkable height
Or reveal thy celestial immortality?
Human thought is too frail to climb thy peaks
Or con the mystery of thy thunder-hush.
Immovable above the orbit of time,
Unreachable to fate's all-gripping whirl,
Beyond the sheer altitudes of the stars,
Stationed aloof to change and moods and strifes,
Crowning the marvellous body of fire,
Thou art the living mask of absolute will,
The ultimate icon of the unknown.
From thy all-gazing, prescient, sky-gloried eyes
Comes the ray-dart piercing the thickest dark;
From thy calm brow of illimitable gaze
Are born the seeds of million blazing mights
That sweep from its perch of shadowless seas
To combat the antediluvian nescience.
From thy unimaginable lotus-crown
The unspanned distances of the triple Inane
Loom on the solitary cerulean spheres
Casting their beams indirect to mortal space.
A nimbus of everlasting epiphany
Hangs round the golden fortress of thy mould
Whose each outline is a bodied symbol-flare,
Whose each curve is a sudden surprise of bliss.
Like a most glorious noon above our ways
Thou hast structured thy own wide pure summit-face
Out of the nectar of spaceless divinity,
Whose every atom is an aureate whole,
An undying entity from paradise.
O face of the king, O king of faces and names!
O universe that is thy visage-peak !
Unmask thy splendour to my human sleep,
Awake my dust, my cells, my limbs, myearth,
And mould my face to thy vast diamond face.
12-11-1952
