Accept my homage, Earth, as I make my last obeisance of the day,
        Bowed at the alter of the setting sun.

You are mighty, and knowable only by the mighty;
        You counterpoise charm and severity;
           Compounded of male and female
You sway human life with unbearable conflict.
        The cup that your right hand fills with nectar
               Is smashed by your left;
Your playground rings with your mocking laughter.
        You make heroism hard to attain;
            You make excellence costly;
You are not merciful to those who deserve mercy.
    Ceaseless warfare is hidden in your plants:
Their crops and fruits are victory-wreaths won from struggle.
       Land and sea are your cruel battlefields -
   Life proclaims its triumph in the face of death.
      Civilization rests its foundation upon your cruelty:
          Ruin is the penalty exacted for any shortcoming.

In the first chapter of your history Demons were supreme -
              Harsh, barbaric, brutish;
       Their clumsy thick fingers lacked art;
With clubs and mallets in hand they rioted over sea and mountain.
    Their fire and smoke churned sky into nightmare;
            They controlled the inanimate world;
        They had blind hatred for life.

Gods came next; by their spells they subdued the Demons -
           The insolence of matter was crushed.
   Mother Earth spread out her green mantle;
       On the eastern peaks stood Dawn;
          On the western sea-shore Evening descended,
              Dispensing peace from her chalice.

              The shackled Demons were humbled;
       But primal barbarity has kept its grip on your history.
           It can suddenly invade order with anarchy -
       From the dark recesses of your being
                  It can suddenly emerge like a snake.
           Its madness is in your blood.
   The spells of the Gods resound through sky and air and forest,
       Sung solemnly day and night, high and low;
                 But from regions under your surface
   Sometimes half-tame Demons raise their serpent-hoods -
          They goad you into wounding your own creatures,
                        Into ruining your own creation.
   At your footstool mounted on evil as well as good,
      To your vast and terrifying beauty,
   I offer today my scarred life's homage.
I touch your huge buried store of life and death,
       Feel it throughout my body and mind.
The corpses of numberless generations of men lie heaped in your dust:
I too shall add a few fistfuls, the final measure of my joys and pains:
    Add them to that name-absorbing, shape-absorbing, fame-absorbing
                   Silent pile of dust.

Earth, clamped into rock or flitting into the clouds;
         Rapt in meditation in the silence of a ring of mountains
      Or noisy with the roar of sleepless sea-waves;
         You are beauty and abundance, terror and famine.
               On the one hand, acres of crops, bent with ripeness,
Brushed free of dew each morning by delicate sunbeams -
   With sunset, too, sending through their rippling greenness
                     Joy, joy;
        On the other hand, in your dry, barren, sickly deserts
           The dance of ghosts amid strewn animal bones.

I have watched your Baisakh-storms swoop like black hawks
           Ripping the horizon with lightning-beaks;
       The whole sky roars like a rampant lion,
              Lashing tail whipping up trees
           Till they crash to the ground in despair;
                    Thatched roofs break loose,
   Race before the wind like convicts from their chains.

But I have known, in Phalgun, the warm south breeze
        Spread all the rhapsodies and soliloquies of love
            In its scent of mango blossom;
Seen the foaming wine of heaven overflow from the moon's goblet;
        Heard coppices suddenly submit to wind's importunity
               And burst into breathless rustling.

   You are gentle and fierce, ancient and renewing;
      You emerged from the sacrificial fire of primal creation
                 Immeasurably long ago.
Your cyclic pilgrimage is littered with meaningless remnants of history;
   You abandon your creations without regret; strew them layer upon layer,
                           Forgotten.

   Guardian of Life, you nurture us
       In little cages of fragmented time,
   Boundaries to all our games, limits to all renown.

Today I stand before you without illusion:
   I do not ask at your door for immortality
       For the many days and nights I have spent weaving your garlands.
           But if I have given true value
   To my small seat in a tiny segment of one of the eras
       That open and close like blinks in the millions of years
                 Of your solar round;
   If I have won from the trials of life a scrap of success;
       Then mark my brow with a sign made from your clay -
           To be rubbed out in time by the night
       In which all signs fade into the final unknown.

                   O aloof, ruthless Earth,
                      Before I am utterly forgotten
                   Let me place my homage at your feet
 

From: Rabindranath Tagore: Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice. Penguin Modern Classics, 1985.

Baisakh - first month of Bengali year and summer in Bengal (mid-April to mid-May)
Phalgun - Bengali month in early spring (mid-February to mid-March)
 

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