! ! An Aside On The Vedanta Paribhasha Of Dharmaraja Adhvarindra Poem by Michael Shepherd

A child with shining eyes,
eyes as alert as any wild creature
guarding its life; free as a human child
who’s loved and watched for,

walks along the beach. In the morning sun
shells, newly washed by the receding tide,
sparkle in the morning sun.

A distant sparkle, noted among many,
continues to sparkle. Bend down and pick it up,
sandy, a dropp of water held in perfect curve;

is it a shell, nacreous in many shades
as it’s lifted to the light, beautiful as if
the Creator had made it only at the dawn today?

or is it a silver dish from that liner that went down,
shaped as a shell, stamped SS Perpetua?
And is it silver-plated from the lower deck,
or solid silver from the first-class deck?

What does the child care? Seeing with
a child’s pure eye, that shell’s more beautiful –
-tells more about the world – than any silversmith
could make?

Carrying whatever it is, the child returns to home;
shining eyes remind the parents of that time
when all the world spoke truth made visible
that knowledge, consciousness, and bliss
are what truth tells, and lives, and is.

*

[With smiling respect to Dr Kuntimaddi Sadananda,
who is conducting a learned disquisition on this text
on the internet..]