A tribute to the poetic spirit of Sri Chinmoy (1931-2007)

Sri Chinmoy leaves behind a published body of over 100,000 poems in over 500 books of poetry; he also wrote many volumes of theatrical plays, prayers and stories. Taken together with his university talks and answers to questions from people interested in different aspects of the inner life, Sri Chinmoy's total published output numbers over 1500 books.

Sri Chinmoy composed poetry with a spontaneity and prolificity unmatched by any other poet that ever lived. He began his poetic career in his adolescence with tightly metered rhyming verse, and developed his style into haiku-like aphorism-poems around the time of his arrival in the West from his native India in 1964. He completed his collection of Ten-Thousand Flower Flames in 1983 after just four years in the writing, and finished his epic "Twenty-Seven Thousand Aspiration-Plants' in 1998. At the time of his passing, he was over half-way through his most ambitious project yet - a collection of 77,000 poems titled 'Seventy-Seven Thousand Service-Trees'.

His poems spoke of an inner world of the soul which most of us have only brief and fitful experience of, and described it with an assurance that could only come from one who has made that world his home:

"No mind, no form, I only exist;

Now ceased all will and thought.

The final end of Nature's dance,

I am It whom I have sought."

In each of his poems, Sri Chinmoy endeavoured to point the reader towards one of the infinitely many facets of the spiritual life. The poems are always aimed at the heart rather than the mind, for it is only the heart can feel these realities and claim them as its own. Some of the poems speak of the incredibly sweet and intimate relationship between man and God, others empathise with the spiritual seeker as he struggles to overcome his imperfections and advance along the spiritual path. His poetry also gives comfort to those of us who knew and loved him, and assurance that death is merely another stage in thee ever advancing journey of the human soul.

"My spirit aware of all the heights,

I am mute in the core of the Sun.

I barter nothing with time and deeds;

My cosmic play is done."