Bavabhuti

 A day off after two days on the tractor mowing meadows and pastureland, the dog curled up on the floor, her nose pressed up against the glass, eyeing the grass for pheasants.  I'm spending a quiet autumn morning at home before I go in quest of a cup of coffee.  

Hunting season has opened.  My buddy Steve was up at 4 a.m., had already scouted out the ground he meant to hunt.  By the time I got upstairs, he had already returned with a buck on the back of the flatbed truck.  He'll have to skin and gut it now, hang it in the cooler to startle me each time I open the door for a cold drink.  Not my cup of tea.  I don't eat a lot of meat.  But as an old Chinese monk advised long ago, "Don't tell a hunter what the Buddha says about not killing."  We each follow our own nature and that's as it should be.

I've been spending my early morning reading the ancient poetry of India.  Here's a short poem by a playwright named Bhavabhuti, who hailed from the southern town of Padmapura and was writing in the early years of the 8th century, still within the shadow of the Muhammadan manifestation.  When a prophetic figure comes, they issue in an age of several hundred years, a cycle when the tenor of the time changes, and these cycles can last up to 1,400 years.  We come to the close of an old cycle in 2032 and we're at the inception of a new one now.  The arts change, the sciences advance, political structures are reinvented.  In fact, at such times entire cultures are born, die, or arise anew.  Bhavabhuti was writing at such a time.  We live in one ourselves.  Who knows yet where it might lead?

So, my favorite poem of the morning -- translated by Andrew Schelling:

Critics scoff

at my work

and declare their contempt --

no doubt they've got

their own little wisdom.

I write nothing for them.

But because time is

endless and our planet

vast, I write these

poems for a person

who will one day be born

with my sort of heart.