Showing posts with label Rainer Maria Rilke. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rainer Maria Rilke. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

allow the unfolding from within






Allow your judgments their own undisturbed development, 
which, like any unfolding, must come from within 
and can by nothing be forced or hastened. 
 
Everything is gestation and then birth. 
 
To allow each impression and each embryo of a feeling
 to complete itself in the dark, in the unsayable, the not-knowing,
 beyond the reach of one's own understanding, 
and humbly and patiently to await the dawning of a new clarity: 
that alone is the way of the artist -
in understanding as in creating.
 
...

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and try to love the questions themselves...
Do not now seek the answers, 
which cannot be given to you because you will not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually,
without noticing it,
live along some distant day into the answer.

 
 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
 from Letters to a Young Poet, April 23, 1903


Monday, January 8, 2024

the one guest

 







She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth -
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness.
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.



~ Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours
Love Poems to God



Wednesday, November 29, 2023

simply

 







I'm too alone in the world, yet not alone enough
to make each hour holy
I'm too small in the world, yet not small enough
to be simply in your presence, like a thing-
just as it is.

I want to know my own will
 and to move with it.
And I want, in the hushed moments
when the nameless draws near,
to be among the wise ones-
or alone.

I want to mirror your immensity.
I want never to be too weak or too old
to bear the heavy, lurching image of you.

I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
for where I am closed, I am false.
I want to stay clear in your sight.




~ Rilke's Book of Hours
The Book of Monastic Life






the way it is with children






.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
.
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
.
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours
translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
.



Saturday, May 13, 2023

how surely gravity's law (II, 16)






How surely gravity's law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of even the strongest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

Each thing -
each stone, blossom, child -
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we belong to
for some empty freedom.

If we surrendered
to earth's intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So, like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God's heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.







~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
.



Saturday, January 21, 2023

the simplicity







.

If you hold to Nature, to the simplicity that is in her, 
to the small detail that scarcely one man sees, 
which can so unexpectedly grow into something great and boundless; 
if you have this love for insignificant things and seek, simply as one who serves, 
to win the confidence of what seems to be poor: 
then everything will become easier for you, 
more coherent and somehow more conciliatory,
 not perhaps in the understanding, which lags wondering behind, 
but in your innermost consciousness, 
wakefulness and knowing.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
from Letters to a Young Poet




Monday, January 2, 2023

as we truly are









We are not poor. We are just without riches,
we who have no will, no world:
marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,
disfigured, stripped of leaves.

Around us swirls the dust of the cities, 
the garbage clings to us.
We are shunned as if contaminated,
thrown away like broken pots, like bones,
like last year's calendar.

And yet if our Earth needed to
she could weave us together like roses
and make of us a garland.

For each being is cleaner than washed stones
and endlessly yours, and like an animal
who knows already in its first blind moments
its need for one thing only -

to let ourselves be poor like that - as we truly are.
 
 



~ Rainer Maria Rilke
III.16, The Book of Poverty and Death

 
 
 

the intimate space



.
 
 
 
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)
 
Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you.  Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits.  Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.
 
 
 
 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Uncollected Poems
.
 
 
 

Sunday, December 4, 2022

pure attention









Bless the spirit that makes connections,
for truly we live in what we imagine.
Clocks move along side our real life
with steps that are ever the same.

Though we do not know our exact location,
we are held in place by what links us.
Across trackless distances
antennas sense each other.

Pure attention, the essence of the powers!
Distracted by each day's doing,
how can we hear the signals?

Even as the farmer labors
there where the seed turns into summer,
it is not his work. It is Earth who gives.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XII
Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy version
art by Christi Belcourt
 


Friday, January 14, 2022

the man watching









I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler’s sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.
 
 
 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke 
translation by Robert Bly





Friday, December 31, 2021

between the hammers our heart endures

 
 
 

 
 
 Happy are those who know
behind all words, the Unsayable stands,
and from that source, the Infinite
crosses over to gladness, and us.

Free of those bridges we raise
with constructed distinctions;
so that always, in each separate joy,
we gaze at the single, wholly mutual core.

...

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
 
 ...
 
Here is the time for the say-able, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as
the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.
Between the hammers our heart
endures, just as the tongue does
between the teeth and, despite that,
still is able to praise.
 
 
 
 
 
 ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
art by Keith Hennig
 



Monday, July 12, 2021

patlience in our sadnesses

.






It seems to me that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension, 
which we feel as paralysis because we no longer hear our astonished emotions living.
 Because we are alone with the unfamiliar presence that has entered us; 
because everything we trust and are used to is for a moment taken away
 from us; because we stand in the midst of a transition 
where we cannot remain standing. 
 
That is why the sadness passes: the new presence inside us,
 the presence that has been added, has entered our heart,
 has gone into its innermost chamber and is no longer even there, – 
is already in our bloodstream. And we don’t know what it was. 
We could easily be made to believe that nothing happened, 
and yet we have changed, as a house that a guest has entered changes. 
We can’t say who has come, perhaps we will never know, 
but many signs indicate that the future enters us in this way
 in order to be transformed in us, long before it happens. 
 
And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad:
 because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment 
when our future steps into us is so much closer to life
 than that other loud and accidental point of time when it happens to us
 as if from outside. The quieter we are, the more patient and open 
we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and serenely the new presence
 can enter us, and the more we can make it our own, 
the more it becomes our fate.
 
 



~ Rainer Maria Rilke

.

Sunday, July 11, 2021

the winged energy of delight

.


 
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
 
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
 
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
 
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions... For the god
wants to know himself in you.

 
 
 
 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from uncollected poems


Wednesday, March 10, 2021

departure







To go forth now
from all the entanglement
that is ours and yet not ours,
that, like the water in an old well,
reflects us in fragments, distorts what we are.
 
From all that clings like burrs and brambles—
to go forth
and see for once, close up, afresh,
what we had ceased to see—
so familiar it had become.
 
To glimpse how vast and how impersonal
is the suffering that filled your childhood.
Yes, to go forth, hand pulling away from hand.
 
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
and indifferent to the dramas of our life.
 
What drives you to go forth? Impatience, instinct,
a dark need, the incapacity to understand.
 
To bow to all this.
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.
Is this the start of a new life?






~ Rainer Maria Rilke
excerpt from  The Prodigal Son, 
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
art by Ruth Norman






Monday, January 18, 2021

you dark net threading through us








I love you, gentlest of Ways,
who ripened us as we wrestled with you.

You, the great homesickness we could never shake off,
you, the forest that always surrounded us,

you, the song we sang in every silence,
you dark net threading through us,

You began yourself so greatly
on that day when you began us -
and we have so ripened in your sunlight,
spreading far and firmly planted -
that now in all people, angels, madonnas,
you can decide: the work is done.

Let your hand rest on the rim of Heaven now
and mutely bear the darkness we bring over you.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke


.

the rest between two notes



My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:
I am only one of my many mouths
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because deaths note wants to climb over-
but in the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.



~ Rainer Maria Rilke






Tuesday, October 27, 2020

you will become


 
 
 



 
You too will find your strength.
We who must live in this time
cannot imagine how strong you will become -
how strange, how surprising,
yet familiar as yesterday.
 
We will sense you
like a fragrance from a nearby garden
and watch you move through our days
like a shaft of sunlight in a sickroom.
 
We will not be herded into churches,
for you are not made by the crowd,
you who meet us in our solitude.
 
We are cradled close in you hands -
and lavishly flung forth.

 
 
 
 
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Pilgrimage, II,26

 
 

Sunday, October 25, 2020

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




Sunday, September 20, 2020

the culture of the day




The cities only care for what is theirs
and uproot all that's in their path.
They crush the creatures like hollow sticks
and burn up nations like kindling.

Their people serve the culture of the day,
losing all balance and moderation,
calling their aimlessness progress,
driving recklessly where they once drove slow,
and with all that metal and glass
making such a racket.

It's as if they were under a spell:
they can no longer be themselves.
Money keeps growing, takes all their strength,
and empties them like a scouring wind,
while they wait for wine and poisonous passions
to spur them to fruitless occupations.




~ Rainer Maria Rilke
III,31, The Book of Poverty and Death
translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
photo by robert frank

Thursday, August 27, 2020

she who reconciles









She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weave them gratefully
into a single cloth -
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration


where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.


You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.





~ Rainer Maria Rilke
from
Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God