Mind Without Fear - a Poem by Tagore

In the wake of the recent hate-filled killings of six innocents belonging to the Sikh community in Wisconsin by a lone gunman tied to the growing white supremacist movement in America, below is a beautiful poem by the great Rabindranath Tagore which every American should read.

Mind Without Fear

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by Thee to ever-widening thought and action -
Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

By Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), Nobel prize for literature, 1913

From The Gitanjali, a collection of 103 poems by Tagore.