Rilke

Three Poems Rainer Maria Rilke

Three poems by Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

Art -- my own July 2017

Gravity’s Law 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 thingeach 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 teach us: to fall, patiently trusting our heaviness.

Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

The Swan This laboring of ours with all that remains undone, as if still bound to it, is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying — releasing ourselves from the very ground on which we stood — is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself into the water. It gently receives him, and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him, as wave follows wave, while he, now wholly serene and sure, with regal composure, allows himself to glide.

Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efrom (II) Oh the losses in the universe, Marina, the perishing stars!

We don't increase their number when we plunge.

In the All, everything has long been counted.

Our own falling does not diminish the sacred number.

Accepting this, we fall to the Source and heal...

Waves, Marina, we are the ocean! Depths, Marina, we are the sky!

Earth, Marina, we are earth, a thousand times spring.

We are larks whose outbursts of song fling them to the heavens.