For A Glance I Dance

"As Nityananda was sitting on the throne, all of His associates danced before Him" CB 5.304

"There was an intense shower of ecstatic devotional love in whatever direction Lord Nityananda cast His glance. Whoever He looked at lost consciousness in ecstatic love and rolled on the ground, forgetting his cloth" CB 5.313

"Sometimes He would sit in the virasana posture and have the devotees dance one after another before Him." CB 5.325

I can only appeal to Lord Nityananda, the bestower of Bhakti, and to do so, I beg to enter into the vision of this pastime as told by Vrindavana Das Thakur in his Caitanya Bhagavata.
Rapt by the vision of Him sitting n the throne, on the dreamlike wings of this poem, I walk up to Him, as He requested everyone, and I dance, begging to receive that glance of incomparable love and mercy.

O NItai Gosai,

to You, unseen

even in my dreams,

I will come in a reverie

where You sit

on a throne of gems,

around You a crowd of raised hands

with camara and cymbals,

clapping and swaying,

in a tumultuous kirtan

that often drums in my mind,

in the quiet dark air

of sleepless nights,

where the ceiling bears

the pangs of my soul,

in this grip of grim greed

how misspent has been this life by me!

Then despair gives away 

to inner cries

" Nityananda! Nityananda!"

To this soul, unworthy

even of the leniency of the Lord,

 please give your causeless shelter.

Let me into this vision of You

where the trees were blooming

flowers of your liking,¹

let me come along

like the others, alone,

to dance for your glance²

even just once,

for your eye-contact

of brimming love,

so secretly cherished,

longed for and treasured 

even by the Darkest

of fallen angels.³

1) Chaitanya Bhagavata AnK II 5.277-278 “ Quickly bring Me a garland of Kadamba flowers”. “I am very fond of kadamba flowers.”

2)CB AnII 5.264 “Anyone who received His glance as He was dancing would fall to the ground in ecstatic love.”

3)Comment  to the Divine Comedy of Dante by R. Benigni “Then Lucifer, the most beautiful of the angels, just to receive a glance of God, disobeyed. And God turned, was the first time that someone disobeyed. He turned and looked at him for a moment, and that was incinerated for eternity in hell for disobedience. But Lucifer has seen God, had the eye-contact of God, indeed eye-to-eye. A little weathered, so to speak. And now suffer for eternity even more, not because it is down in the underworld, but because he saw God and will not be able to see Him again. That is the suffering of Lucifer, eternal, insurmountable and intolerable. When one has seen God you cannot live without seeing him again, is just unbearable.”