Collected Poems - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

672 Pondicherry, c. 1927 – 1947
What compelled thee, O Void, to create and labour,
Orwhoroseupinthee,alivingMaker?
How could thought begin in thy vacant silence
Measureless, dateless?
All these stars that spin in the fields of Nothing,
Tiny Time-fires lit in thy untoned darkness
Faintly hailing through the enormous distance
Aimless and lifeless, —
Why were they made, for what are their wheels and
turnings,
Splendid desert-hearted disastrous burnings,
Mindless hopeless fierce inarticulate yearnings
Fruitless for ever?
All these waves of forces that running circling
Leap by discontinuous starts through Nowhere,
Strangely born in quantums of causeless Matter
Wombed out of Nihil —
Each is a lawless entity chance-directed,
Yet a law prevails in their sum of movement;
Is thy soul released in these particles formwards,
Thy thought that governs?
In gleam Konarak
In gleam Konarak — Konarak of the Gods
A woman sits, her body a glimmering ray.
At her feet the moon trails its silvery dreams,
On her head is the sun and the purple day.
Always she sits there turning a wheel
Whose summit is lost in lights, its base in the abyss