Two Planets

From the very first time I read this poem, I knew I was going to blog it. I just wasn’t sure when. As time passed by, it kept changing. Drawing energy from events around me, and from me. Always draping itself with shades of sadness somehow familiar if I only dared to slip beneath the calm surface of the ocean that fills my heart.

Today, although transformed, it is just as pure and deep as the first time I read it. Today, it has many meanings, woven together, just like life’s tangled relations. And just like life itself, happy or sad, you just have to endure it:

Two planets meeting face to face,
One to the other cried ‘How sweet
If endlessly we might embrace,
And here for ever stay! how sweet
If Heaven a little might relent,
And leave our light in one light blent!’

But through that longing to dissolve
In one, the parting summons sounded.
Immutably the stars revolve,
By changeless orbits each is bounded;
Eternal union is a dream,
And severance the world’s law supreme.

Poem by Muhammad Iqbal, the “Poet of the East”, from “The Call of the Road”