Dear Ones,
Each time that I read Rainer Maria Rilke I am touched. Sometimes there are tears of joy, sometimes tears of knowing. Always I feel as if we are peering through the same window of Life and he has put what my heart feels onto paper. When I find music that I like, I will listen to it over and over but with Rilke, I read a page at a time, savoring the rest for some other day and thankful for each reading. I read his words often aloud to myself, as if I’m doing my own personal poetry reading. And today I have chosen:
Only as a child am I awake
and able to trust
that after every fear and every night
I will behold you again.
However often I get lost,
however far my thinking strays,
I know you will be here, right here,
time trembling around you.
To me it is as if I were at once
infant, boy, man and more.
I feel that only as it circles
is abundance found.
I thank you, deep power
that works me ever more lightly
in ways I can’t make out.
The day’s labor grows simple now,
and like a holy face
held in my dark hands.
Excerpted from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
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