Fragments from broken-off days

7 November

Like birds that get used to walking
and grow heavier and heavier, as in free-fall:
the earth sucks out of their long claws
the brave memory of every
great thing that happens high up,
and turns them almost into leaves that cling
thickly to the ground, -like plants that,
scarcely growing upward, cringe into the soil,
sink lightly and softly and wetly
into black clods and sicken there lifelessly,-
like mad children, like a face
in a coffin, like happy hands that
grow hesitant, because in the full chalice
things are mirrored that are not near,
like calls for help that in the evening wind
collide with many dark huge chimes,
like house plants that have dried for days,
like streets that are ill-framed, like curls
in which all jewels have grown blind,
like early morning in April
facing the hospital’s many windows:
the sick press up against the hall’s seam
and gaze: the grace of a new light
makes all the streets springtimelike and wide;
they see only the bright majesty
that makes each house young and full of laughter,-
and don’t know that all night long
a storm has ripped the garments from the skies,
a storm of waters sent from where the world is still frozen,
a storm that even now roars through the streets
and removes all burdens from the things’ shoulders,
that something outside is huge and incensed,
that outside Power stalks, a fist
that would strangle each one of the sick
in the midst of this brilliance, which they behold
and thrill to and believe in with racing hearts.

Like long nights in faded bowers
that have been ripped open on all sides
and are much too large to sit inside
with someone loved and weep together,
like naked girls, approaching over stones,
like drunkards in a birch grove,
like words that mean nothing definite
and yet fly, penetrate the ear, continue on
into the brain and secretly among the nerve-branches
through every limb try out leap after leap,
like old men who curse their race
and then die, so that the harm imposed
can never be annulled,
like full roses, artfully brought up
in the blue hothouse where the breezes lied,
and then from the exhilaration in great curves
strewn out upon the scattered snow,
like an earth that cannot orbit
because too many dead weigh on its feeling,
like a man killed and buried
whose hands are warding off roots,
like one of the tall, slim, red
midsummer flowers, which unredeemed
dies suddenly in its favourite meadow-wind
because below its root hits turquoise
in the earring corpse
and stops…

And many a day’s hours were like that.
As though my likeness, clay-gray, lay somewhere
in hands that tortured it dementedly.
I felt the sharp pricks of their playing.
As though a long rain fell on me
in which all things slowly changed.

(Excerpt from Diaries of a young poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow & Michael Winkler. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 1998)