I Seem to Have Loved You...

by Rabindranath Tagore

  

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,

In life after life, in age after age forever.

My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs

That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms

In life after life, in age after age forever.

  

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,

Its ancient tale of being apart or together,

As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge

Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

  

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount

At the heart of time love of one for another.

We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same

Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell -

Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever:

  

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,

The love of all man's days both past and forever:

Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,

The memories of all loves merging with this one of ours -

And the songs of every poet both past and forever.

 

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For Jei

   

I wish the promise of a dream fulfilled

 

and unending entourage of love and warm thoughts

 

the power to wish all that you want to come true

 

a life of peace and love with all that you care for

   

However;

   

all I have now is love

 

true to the core and unending as time.

 

the promise of faith and honesty

 

pure from it's beginnings.

   

I love thee