Rainer Maria Rilke: "It's possible"

It’s possible I am pushing through solid rock
in flintlike layers, as the ore lies, alone;
I am such a long way in I see no way through,
and no space: everything is close to my face,
and everything close to my face is stone.

I don’t have much knowledge yet in grief—
so this massive darkness makes me small.
You be the master: make yourself fierce, break in:
then your great transforming will happen to me,
and my great grief cry will happen to you.




"It's possible" ["Vielleicht, dass ich durch schwere Berge gehe"] by Rainer Maria Rilke. Text as published in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated from the original German by Robert Bly (HarperCollins, 1981). 

Art credit: "Mountain wall in Norway," photograph by tupungato.

Curator's note: Another mass shooting on Wednesday in the United States. My heart is so heavy. Robbed of words. The dark enormity of needless suffering here and around the world "makes me feel small," as perhaps it does you. Yet each day we can choose to give ourselves up once again to the painful work of the "great transforming," both within and without. 

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Part Two, XII" ["Want the change"]

Want the change.  Be inspired by the flame

where everything shines as it disappears.

The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much

as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.

Is it safer to be gray and numb?

What turns hard becomes rigid

and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.

Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking

finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation

it did not think it could survive.  And Daphne, becoming 

       a laurel,

dares you to become the wind.

"Part Two, XII" ["Want the change"], from The Sonnets to Orpheus by  Rainer Maria Rilke. Text as published in In Praise of Mortality: Selected Poems from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, translated from the original German and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (Riverhead, 2005). Reprinted with permissions of the editors.

Read the original German on page 116 of this online source. 

Art credit: "Windmill in a Windy Wheatfield, wallpaper by 1ms.net.

Rainer Maria Rilke: "I, 12" ["I believe in all that has never been spoken"]

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.



"I, 12" ["I believe in all that has never been spoken"] by Rainer Maria Rilke. Text as published in Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated from the original German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. Reprinted with permission of the editors.

Read the German text on page 65 of this online source. 

Art credit: Untitled image by unknown photographer.

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Departure of the Prodigal Son"

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?

"Departure of the Prodigal Son" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated from the original German by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (HarperOne, 2009). Text presented here by editor permission.

Art credit: "Frayed rope about to break isolated on blue background," image by unknown photographer.

Rainer Maria Rilke: "II, 29" ["Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower"]

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.



"II, 29" ["Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower"] by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Sonnets to Orpheus, anthologized in In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Edited and translated from the original German by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows. © Riverhead, 2005.

Read the German text online on p. 134 of this source.

Listen to translator Joanna Macy recite this poem and offer brief commentary, clipped from an interview with Krista Tippet, OnBeing.org, July 13, 2010.

Art credit: "Church Bell Cortona," watercolor painting (8 of 40) by Cameron Lee Roberts (originally color).

 

Rainer Maria Rilke: Untitled ["I Love the Dark Hours of My Being"]

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

Untitled ["I Love the Dark Hours of My Being"] by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. © Riverhead, 1997.

Photography credit: "Infrared Cherry Tree Gravestone," infrared image by Deborah Sandidge. 

Rainer Maria Rilke: "Part One, Sonnet IV" ["You Who Let Yourselves Feel: Enter the Breathing"]

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins beside you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.



"Part One, Sonnet IV" ["You Who Let Yourselves Feel: Enter the Breathing"], from Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Taken from In Praise of Mortality: Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, translated from the German and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. © Riverhead, 2005. 

Photography credit: Part of a work entitled "Cultural Intercourse," by Temsuyanger Longkumer (originally color). The logs are made of paper rubbings.

Rainer Maria Rilke: "A Walk"

My eyes already touch the sunny hill,
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has its inner light, even from a distance—

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on,

answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

"A Walk" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly. © Harper Perennial, 1981.

Photography credit: "Hilly Road," by Joseph Austin (originally color).


 

Rainer Maria Rilke: "I, 1"

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there's a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

"I, 1" by Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. © Riverhead Books, 1996.

Photograph: "Footprints in Sand," by Mal Bray.