Sunday, March 17, 2019

Saikat Gupta Majumdar writes

The only worth


The little Bird blue
With the nice little wings
Flies around the town
Dances, hops and sings

One day it flies far
Beyond the town
O’er the hills
To the farthest corner
Where it meets an angel
Waiting with flowers in hand
In bright white gown
On a beach of golden sand.

“Welcome to the heaven
From your earth
For your last seven lives
This is the only worth”.
"When angels talk in Heaven above / I'm sure they have no words more sweet  / Than home and love." -- Robert William Service

1 comment:

  1. Home And Love

    Just Home and Love! the words are small
    Four little letters unto each;
    And yet you will not find in all
    The wide and gracious range of speech
    Two more so tenderly complete:
    When angels talk in Heaven above,
    I'm sure they have no words more sweet
    Than Home and Love.

    Just Home and Love! it's hard to guess
    Which of the two were best to gain;
    Home without Love is bitterness;
    Love without Home is often pain.
    No! each alone will seldom do;
    Somehow they travel hand and glove:
    If you win one you must have two,
    Both Home and Love.

    And if you've both, well then I'm sure
    You ought to sing the whole day long;
    It doesn't matter if you're poor
    With these to make divine your song.
    And so I praisefully repeat,
    When angels talk in Heaven above,
    There are no words more simply sweet
    Than Home and Love.

    -- Robert William Service

    Service was known as "the Bard of the Yukon" because of the poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" in his 1st book "Songs of a Sourdough" (1907). ("Sourdough" was Yukon slang for a provident old-timer. In the US it was published as "The Spell of the Yukon and Other Verses." The Klondike Gold Rush was a migration of 100,000 prospectors into the Yukon in northwestern Canada between 1896-99, but Service was not one of them. An Englishman, the son of a Scottish banker, in 1904 he was sent to Whitehorse, Yukon, in 1904 as a 30-year-old employee of the Victoria, British Columbia, branch of the Imperial Bank of Canada. He wrote the book at the instigation of the editor of the "Whitehorse Star," who told him to write something about the local scene: "There’s a rich paystreak waiting for someone to work. Why don’t you go in and stake it?" Service sent the manuscript to his father in Toronto to get it privately printed as gifts for his Yukon friends, but William Briggs returned the check and offered to print it for public consumption at a 10% royalty. The foreman and printers recited the ballads while they worked on it, and a salesman read the proofs out loud as they came off the typsetting machines. It went through 7 printings even before its official release date. Service made more than $100,000 on the book (about $2.7 million in today's currency), which has sold over 3 million copies. He continued to write popular verse, including "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone" (1912), which contained "Home and Love."

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