Rilke

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.

1,59 from Rilke’s Book of a Monastic Life.

Your first word of all was light,

and time began.  Then for long you were silent.

Your second word was man, and fear began,

which grips us still.

Are you about to speak again?

I don’t want your third word.

Sometimes I pray:  Please don’t talk.

Let all your doing be by gesture only.

Go on writing in faces and stone

what your silence means.

Be our refuge from the wrath

That drove us out of Paradise.

Be our shepherd, but never call us –

We can’t bear to know what’s ahead.

1,44 same book as above.

All who seek you

test you.

And those who find you

bind you to image and gesture.

I would rather sense you

as the earth senses you.

In my ripening

ripens

what you are.

I need from you no tricks

to prove you exist.

Time, I know,

is other than you.

No miracles, please.

Just let your laws

become clearer

from generation to generation.

11,15 Rilke’s Book of Pilgrimage.

Sometimes a man rises from the supper table

and goes outside.  And he keeps on going

because somewhere to the east there’s a church.

His children bless his name as if he were dead.

Another man stays at home until he dies,

stays with plates and glasses.

So then it is his children who go out

into the world, seeking the church that he forgot.

11,19 Rilke’s Book of Pilgrimage