At each day’s end
You shawled the night about you
Gathering in the cold,
And rehearsed again
Your most private agonies,
As if your turn of phrase
Might stir a holy grammar, Might persuade the silence to speak.
But by day,
With the sureness of one who might attend upon a prince
You washed the disgrace from their bodies,
Eked out from them the blessing of their names,
And restored life
To those whose lives were ending.
You longed to bring the touch of your unaccountable faith
To those pressed by municipal indifference
Into the crannies of a slum,
To bring your presence, to those whose last capacity was to wait.
And so you would child your sorrow
Through Calcutta Streets,
Eyes fixed at the height of a beggar’s hand,
Until each day revealed itself
As a scrubbed infant,
Face shining like a holiday.