"What were your dreams, Ahalya, when you passed Long years as stone, rooted in earth, prayer And ritual gone, sacred fire extinct In the dark, abandoned forest-shram? Earth Merged with your body; did you know her vast Love, did hazy awareness haunt your stone? ...And keep you blindly, dimly, half-awake? ...When life’s excited zest Rushed along branching paths in numerous forms To conquer the desert, did it rise in outrage, Circle your stone and crush your sterile curse? Didn’t its pounding blows shake you awake?... Did you, long asleep on her breast, enter That place of oblivion, cool as endless night, Where millions sleep forever without fear, Resting their life’s exhaustion in the dust, Where withered flowers fall in the day’s heat, Burnt-up stars and meteors, crumbled fame, Sated pleasure, grief too tired to sting? There, Earth smoothed with her soothing hand Your lines of sin and stress. Today you shine Like a newly woken princess, calm and pure. You stare amazed at the dawn world. The dew Which moistened your stone at night shimmers now On your black, loosely-flowing hair. The mosses Which clothed you with the green mantle of Earth, Thickened and brightened by each fall of rain, Are now a sari lightly placed by a mother’s Loving hand on your glorious naked limbs. The world smiles; you recognise that smile. You gaze; your heart swings back from the far past, Traces its lost steps. In a sudden rush, All round, your former knowledge of life returns... Like first Created dawn, you slowly rise from the blue Sea of forgetfulness. You stare entranced; The world, too, is speechless; face to face Beside a sea of mystery none can cross You know afresh what you have always known."