untitled no. 9-1

“Oh arrive and leave. You were still half a child,
Completing a dancing pose for but a moment,
The pure form of a star constellation, which is
One of the ways in which we overcome the mindless random order

Of Nature, also just for a moment. For it was only when Orpheus sang
That Nature awoke and heard, was quickened in alertness.
Though far away in time, this stirred you. And you were somewhat
Surprised that a tree considered so slowly and hesitated

To join with you in hearing it.
You sensed the very place where the lyre
Raised itself aloft -; the mid-point which has never been heard.

For you ventured your beautiful steps
And you hoped, one day in holy celebration
To alter the course and countenance of your friend.
(Her friend is himself.)”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“How the bird cry seizes us …
The creation once, of any cry.
But even the children, playing in the open air,
Cry out, beyond all true cries.

Chance cries out. Into the spaces between
All of these vastnesses of a world, (where the broken
Bird cry insinuates itself, like men in dreams -)
They drive and pound in their screeching, like wedges.

So where on earth are we then? We break freer and freer,
Hunting, like kites which have snapped loose
Half way up, with laughing borders,

Shredded by the wind. – Array all those who cry out,
Oh god who sings! that they may awaken with a roar,
Bearing upon them as a current the head and the lyre.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“But the rage passes and leaves no trace behind.
The curves of flight through the air, and those that ply them,
Perhaps none is without purpose. But only as memory.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

“Fate measures us perhaps with the breadth of being,
Which is strange to us;
Just think how much distance there is between a girl and a man
When she is avoiding him or thinking of him.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus