Poetry for Ordinary Time

A last bit of poetry for Ordinary Time, 2014.  This time, selections from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Du dunkelnder Grund...Dear darkening ground

Dear darkening ground,
you've endured so patiently the walls we've built,
perhaps you'll give the cities one more hour

and grant the churches and cloisters two.
And those that labour -- maybe you'll let their work
grip them another five hours, or seven,

before you become forest again, and water, and
       widening wilderness
in that hour of inconceivable terror
when you take back your name
from all things.

Just give me a little more time!
I want to love the things
as no one has thought to love them,
until they're real and ripe and worthy of you.

I want only seven days, seven
on which no one has ever written himself --
seven pages of solitude.

There will be a book that includes those pages,
and she who takes it in her hands
will sit staring at it a long time,

until she feels that she is being held
and you are writing.

                                                                              I, 61*

To listen to commentary on this poem by the translator, Joanna Macy: click HERE.

                                            *****************     *****************

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen...I live my life in widening circles

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I have been circling around God, that primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and still I don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

                                                                            I,2*

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht...God speaks to each of us as he makes us

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

Flare up like flame
and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going.  No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

                                                                       I, 59*

Rainer Maria Rilke
1875-1926

*Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,  "The Book of a Monastic Life" - translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Riverhead Books, New York, 1996.