Tagore’s “The New Year” (Poem of the Day)

(By Rabindranath Tagore)

The New Year

LIKE FRUIT, shaken free by an impatient wind

from the veils of its mother flower,

thou comest, New Year, whirling in a frantic dance

amid the stampede of the wind-lashed clouds

and infuriate showers,

while trampled by thy turbulence

are scattered away the faded and the frail

in an eddying agony of death.

Thou art no dreamer afloat on a languorous breeze,

lingering among the hesitant whisper and hum

of an uncertain season.

Thine is a majestic march, o terrible Stranger,

thundering forth an ominous incantation,

driving the days on to the perils of a pathless dark,

where thou carriest a dumb signal in thy banner,

a decree of destiny undeciphered.

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h/t The Complete Works of Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore (d. 1941) was a Bengali poet, dramatist, novelist, social reformer and theorist of peace. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.

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