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Rilke

   


 

Here the eyes falter against the holy landscape of night.
O silent poetsilence of silences.
Your voice, when you let it go
from your searching and penetrating images,
is like no mere singing imperfect from its eventual stillness,
gathered, then falling back into itself without duration.
Your voice falls off into eternity like the sacred distance
of the nocturnal horizon that continually haunts us
with its ghosts
endless lamentation of the unknowable; God.
How often did you stand there,
before the final turning of night?
You refused to avert your presence
as the suffusion of haze descended
through the deep unending space of the night sky
and remained hanging over
all the transient landscapes of the cities, glistening.
We stood there unawakened,
as the glinting artificial sky would go off
threatening a low horizon.
You transformed this eternity inside you with pure emotion,
this distance that gripped us like the unendurable space of night
when for the first time, our eyes greedily met
the terror that surrounded us in beauty.


Here the soul falters against the holy landscape of sorrow.


 

 
     
   

 

Copyright © 2002 D.E. Willer. All rights reserved.