childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before

you try to find words for something so lost,

for those long childhood afternoons you knew

that vanished so completely - and why?

We're still reminded - : sometimes by a rain,

but we can no longer say what it means;

life was never again so filled with meeting,

with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us

except what happens to things and creatures:

we lived their world as something human,

and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd

and as overburdened by vast distances,

and summoned and stirred as from far away,

and slowly, like a long new thread,

introduced into that picture-sequence

where now having to go on bewilders us. 

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

photo by kathleen connally