He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon.
I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into
the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.
I take pride in this great wall, and I plaster it with dust and sand
lest a least hole should be left in this name;
and for all the care I take I lose sight of my true being.
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) is considered the greatest writer in modern Indian literature. A Bengali poet, novelist, educator, Nobel Laureate for Literature [1913], Tagore was awarded a knighthood in 1915, but surrendered it in 1919 in protest against the Massacre of Amritsar, where British troops killed some 400 Indian demonstrators.
