under the calm influence of the heavens?

.

 

 

Long afternoons of childhood..., not yet really

life; still only growing-time

that drags at the knees -, time of defenseless waiting.

And between what we will perhaps become

and this edgeless existence -: deaths,

uncountable.  Love, the possessive, surrounds

the child forever betrayed in secret

and promises him to the future; which is not his own.

Afternoons that he spent by himself, staring

from mirror to mirror; puzzling himself with the riddle

of his own name: Who? Who? - But the others 

come home again, overwhelm him.

What the window or path

or the moldy smell of a drawer

confided to him yesterday: they drown it out and destroy it.

Once more he belongs to them.

As tendrils sometimes fling themselves out from the thicker

bushes, his desire will fling itself out

from the tangle of family and hang there, swaying in the light.

But daily they blunt his glance upon their inhabited 

walls - that wide innocent glance which lets dogs in

and holds the tall flowers,

still almost face to face.

Oh how far it is

from this watched-over creature to everything that will someday

be his wonder or his destruction.

His immature strength

learns cunning among the traps.

But the constellation

of his future love has long 

been moving among the stars.  What terror

will tear his heart out of the track of its fleeing

to place it in perfect submission, under the calm

influence of the heavens?

 

 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from his uncollected poems

translation by Stephen Mitchell