Vilāpa-kusumāñjali

Author: Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī

"A Handful of Flowers of Lament" — 104 verses by Raghunātha Dāsa Gosvāmī, the first poem of his Stavāvalī. Raghunātha, the son of a rich Bengali landholder, ran away from home to Śrī Caitanya and spent his last decades beside Rādhā-kuṇḍa in Vṛndāvana. Here he speaks as a mañjarī, a young maidservant of Rādhā, and asks not for Kṛṣṇa’s love nor for Rādhā’s friendship but for one thing: to serve her. The poem follows Rādhā’s day — the bath, the dressing, the meal at Nanda’s house, the meetings at the kuṇḍa — and every scene turns into the plea “when will I be allowed…”. It tells no story; it is the longing of a servant not yet accepted, and the tradition reads it as its most intimate book.