Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West" Source: Nobel e-Museum

Tagore once said, when commenting on the Indian diaspora in a letter to his friend C.F.Andrews: “To study a banyan tree, you not only must know its main stem in its own soil, but also must trace the growth of its greatness in the further soil, for then you can know the true nature of its vitality. The civilization of India, like the banyan tree, has shed its beneficent shade away from its own birthplace. India can live and grow by spreading abroad - not the political India, but the ideal India.”

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The Banyan Tree by Rabindranath Tagore from The Crescent Moon

O you shaggy-headed banyan tree standing on the bank of the pond, have you forgotten the little child, like the birds that have nested in your branches and left you?
Do you not remember how he sat at the window and wondered at the tangle of your roots that plunged underground?
The women would come to fill their jars in the pond, and your huge black shadow would wriggle on the water like sleep struggling to wake up.
Sunlight danced on the ripples like restless tiny shuttles weaving golden tapestry.
Two ducks swam by the weedy margin above their shadows, and the child would sit still and think.
He longed to be the wind and blow through your rustling branches, to be your shadow and lengthen with the day on the water, to be a bird and perch on your top-most twig, and to float like those ducks among the weeds and shadows.

Your turn

Write a poem about a tree or another type of plant. Send us your texts.

Your texts

Untitled

The sky is red.
Dance on the grass before the last sunset.
Dance and do not stop,
The sky spits fire.
The trees are burning.
This is the beginning of the end.
Dance, dance and dance again.
This is last day the sun shines.
You are not going to see the stars again.

Eric Ramirez Rodriguez