What Is Love? - A Poem by Paramahansa Yogananda

 

What is Love?

 

Love is the scent with the lotus born.

It is the silent choirs of petals

Singing the winter’s harmony of uniform beauty.

Love is the song of the soul, singing to God.

It is the balanced rhythmic dance of planets -

sun and moon lit

In the skyey hall festooned with fleecy clouds -

Around the sovereign Silent Will.

It is the thirst of the rose to drink the sunrays

And blush red with life.

‘Tis the promptings of the mother earth

To feed her milk to the tender, thirsty roots,

And to nurse all life.

It is the urge of the sun

To keep all things alive.

Love is the unseen craving of the Mother Divine

That took the protecting father – form,

And that feeds helpless mouths

With milk of mother’s tenderness.

It is the babies’ sweetness,

Coaxing the rain of parental sympathy

To shower upon them.

It is the lover’s unenslaved surrender to the beloved

To serve and solace.

It is the elixir of friendship,

Reviving broken and bruised souls.

It is the martyr’s zeal to shed his blood

For the well-beloved fatherland.

It is the ineffable, silent call of the heart to another
heart.

It is the God-drunk poet’s heartaches

For every creature’s groans.

Love is to enjoy the family rose of petal-beings,

And thence to move to spacious fields -

Passing by portals of social, national, international
sympathy,

On to the limitless Cosmic Home -

To gaze with looks of wonderment,

And to serve all that lives, still or moving.

This is to know what love is.

He knows who lives it.

Love is evolution’s ameliorative call

To the far-strayed sons

To return to Perfection’s home.

It is the call of the beauty – robed ones

To worship the great Beauty.

It is the call of God

Through silent intelligences

And starburst of feelings.

Love is the Heaven

Toward which the flowers, rivers, nations, atoms,
creatures – you and I

Are rushing by the straight path of action right,

Or winding laboriously on error’s path,

All to reach haven there at last.

 

Paramahansa Yogananda      (1893 – 1952)

 

An Indian Guru who introduced many westerners to the teachings of meditation and Kriya Yoga through his book, Autobiography of a Yogi. Yogananda also wrote poetry expressing his spiritual experiences.