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Michael R Burch Feb 2020
Herbsttag ("Autumn Day")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Lord, it is time. Let the immense summer go.
Lay your long shadows over the sundials
and over the meadows, let the free winds blow.
Command the late fruits to fatten and shine;
O, grant them another Mediterranean hour!
Urge them to completion, and with power
convey final sweetness to the heavy wine.
Who has no house now, never will build one.
Who's alone now, shall continue alone;
he'll wake, read, write long letters to friends,
and pace the tree-lined pathways up and down,
restlessly, as autumn leaves drift and descend.

Original text:

Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr groß.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren laß die Winde los.

Befiel den letzten Früchten voll zu sein;
gib ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin und jage
die letzte Süße in den schweren Wein.

Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.

Originally published by Measure

Keywords/Tags: German, translation, sonnet, Rainer Marie Rilke, autumn, day, summer, sundial, sundials, meadow, meadows, wind, winds, fruit, fruits, sweetness, wine, house, alone, loneliness, alienation, letters, friends, pathways, roads, lanes, leaves



Du im Voraus (“You who never arrived”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

You who never arrived in my arms, my Belovéd,
lost before love began...
How can I possibly know which songs might please you?

I have given up trying to envision you
in portentous moments before the next wave impacts...
when all the vastness and immenseness within me,
all the far-off undiscovered lands and landscapes,
all the cities, towers and bridges,
all the unanticipated twists and turns in the road,
and all those terrible terrains once traversed by strange gods—
engender new meaning in me:
your meaning, my enigmatic darling...
You, who continually elude me.

You, my Belovéd,
who are every garden I ever gazed upon,
longingly, through some country manor’s open window,
so that you almost stepped out, pensively, to meet me;
who are every sidestreet I ever chanced upon,
even though you’d just traipsed tantalizingly away, and vanished,
while the disconcerted shopkeepers’ mirrors
still dizzily reflected your image, flashing you back at me,
startled by my unwarranted image!

Who knows, but perhaps the same songbird’s cry
echoed through us both,
yesterday, separate as we were, that evening?



The next two poems are my modern English translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s First and Second Elegies. These are the opening elegies in a collection commonly called the “Duino Elegies” because Rilke began composing them at Duino Castle, near Trieste, Italy, in 1912.



Rilke’s First Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Who, if I objected, would hear me among the angelic orders?
For if the least One pressed me intimately against its breast,
I would be lost in its infinite Immensity!
Because beauty, which we mortals can barely endure, is the beginning of terror;
we stand awed when it benignly declines to annihilate us.
Every Angel is terrifying!
And so I restrain myself, swallowing the sound of my pitiful sobbing.
For whom may we turn to, in our desire?
Not to Angels, nor to men, and already the sentient animals are aware
that we are all aliens in this metaphorical existence.
Perhaps some tree still stands on a hillside, which we can study with our ordinary vision.
Perhaps the commonplace street still remains amid man’s fealty to materiality—
the concrete items that never destabilize.
Oh, and of course there is the night: her dark currents caress our faces ...
But whom, then, do we live for?
That longed-for but mildly disappointing presence the lonely heart so desperately desires?
Is life any less difficult for lovers?
They only use each other to avoid their appointed fates!
How can you fail to comprehend?
Fling your arms’ emptiness into this space we occupy and inhale:
may birds fill the expanded air with more intimate flying!
Yes, the springtime still requires you.
Perpetually a star waits for you to recognize it.
A wave recedes toward you from the distant past,
or as you walk beneath an open window, a violin yields virginally to your ears.
All this was preordained. But how can you incorporate it? ...
Weren't you always distracted by expectations, as if every event presaged some new beloved?
(Where can you harbor, when all these enormous strange thoughts surging within you keep
you up all night, restlessly rising and falling?)
When you are full of yearning, sing of loving women, because their passions are finite;
sing of forsaken women (and how you almost envy them)
because they could love you more purely than the ones you left gratified.
Resume the unattainable exaltation; remember: the hero survives;
even his demise was merely a stepping stone toward his latest rebirth.
But spent and exhausted Nature withdraws lovers back into herself,
as if lacking the energy to recreate them.
Have you remembered Gaspara Stampa with sufficient focus—
how any abandoned girl might be inspired by her fierce example
and might ask herself, "How can I be like her?"
Shouldn't these ancient sufferings become fruitful for us?
Shouldn’t we free ourselves from the beloved,
quivering, as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension,
so that in the snap of release it soars beyond itself?
For there is nowhere else where we can remain.
Voices! Voices!
Listen, heart, as levitating saints once listened,
until the elevating call soared them heavenward;
and yet they continued kneeling, unaware, so complete was their concentration.
Not that you could endure God's voice—far from it!
But heed the wind’s voice and the ceaseless formless message of silence:
It murmurs now of the martyred young.
Whenever you attended a church in Naples or Rome,
didn't they come quietly to address you?
And didn’t an exalted inscription impress its mission upon you
recently, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
What they require of me is that I gently remove any appearance of injustice—
which at times slightly hinders their souls from advancing.
Of course, it is endlessly strange to no longer inhabit the earth;
to relinquish customs one barely had the time to acquire;
not to see in roses and other tokens a hopeful human future;
no longer to be oneself, cradled in infinitely caring hands;
to set aside even one's own name,
forgotten as easily as a child’s broken plaything.
How strange to no longer desire one's desires!
How strange to see meanings no longer cohere, drifting off into space.
Dying is difficult and requires retrieval before one can gradually decipher eternity.
The living all err in believing the too-sharp distinctions they create themselves.
Angels (men say) don't know whether they move among the living or the dead.
The eternal current merges all ages in its maelstrom
until the voices of both realms are drowned out in its thunderous roar.
In the end, the early-departed no longer need us:
they are weaned gently from earth's agonies and ecstasies,
as children outgrow their mothers’ *******.
But we, who need such immense mysteries,
and for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit's progress—
how can we exist without them?
Is the legend of the lament for Linos meaningless—
the daring first notes of the song pierce our apathy;
then, in the interlude, when the youth, lovely as a god, has suddenly departed forever,
we experience the emptiness of the Void for the first time—
that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and aids us?



Rilke’s Second Elegy
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch

Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,
one of the soul’s lethal raptors, well aware of your nature.
As in the days of Tobias, when one of you, obscuring his radiance,
stood at the simple threshold, appearing ordinary rather than appalling
while the curious youth peered through the window.
But if the Archangel emerged today, perilous, from beyond the stars
and took even one step toward us, our hammering hearts
would pound us to death. What are you?
Who are you? Joyous from the beginning;
God’s early successes; Creation’s favorites;
creatures of the heights; pollen of the flowering godhead; cusps of pure light;
stately corridors; rising stairways; exalted thrones;
filling space with your pure essence; crests of rapture;
shields of ecstasy; storms of tumultuous emotions whipped into whirlwinds ...
until one, acting alone, recreates itself by mirroring the beauty of its own countenance.
While we, when deeply moved, evaporate;
we exhale ourselves and fade away, growing faint like smoldering embers;
we drift away like the scent of smoke.
And while someone might say: “You’re in my blood! You occupy this room!
You fill this entire springtime!” ... Still, what becomes of us?
We cannot be contained; we vanish whether inside or out.
And even the loveliest, who can retain them?
Resemblance ceaselessly rises, then is gone, like dew from dawn’s grasses.
And what is ours drifts away, like warmth from a steaming dish.
O smile, where are you bound?
O heavenward glance: are you a receding heat wave, a ripple of the heart?
Alas, but is this not what we are?
Does the cosmos we dissolve into savor us?
Do the angels reabsorb only the radiance they emitted themselves,
or sometimes, perhaps by oversight, traces of our being as well?
Are we included in their features, as obscure as the vague looks on the faces of pregnant women?
Do they notice us at all (how could they) as they reform themselves?
Lovers, if they only knew how, might mutter marvelous curses into the night air.
For it seems everything eludes us.
See: the trees really do exist; our houses stand solid and firm.
And yet we drift away, like weightless sighs.
And all creation conspires to remain silent about us: perhaps from shame, perhaps from inexpressible hope?
Lovers, gratified by each other, I ask to you consider:
You cling to each other, but where is your proof of a connection?
Sometimes my hands become aware of each other
and my time-worn, exhausted face takes shelter in them,
creating a slight sensation.
But because of that, can I still claim to be?
You, the ones who writhe with each other’s passions
until, overwhelmed, someone begs: “No more!...”;
You who swell beneath each other’s hands like autumn grapes;
You, the one who dwindles as the other increases:
I ask you to consider ...
I know you touch each other so ardently because each caress preserves pure continuance,
like the promise of eternity, because the flesh touched does not disappear.
And yet, when you have survived the terror of initial intimacy,
the first lonely vigil at the window, the first walk together through the blossoming garden:
lovers, do you not still remain who you were before?
If you lift your lips to each other’s and unite, potion to potion,
still how strangely each drinker eludes the magic.
Weren’t you confounded by the cautious human gestures on Attic gravestones?
Weren’t love and farewell laid so lightly on shoulders they seemed composed of some ethereal substance unknown to us today?
Consider those hands, how weightlessly they rested, despite the powerful torsos.
The ancient masters knew: “We can only go so far, in touching each other. The gods can exert more force. But that is their affair.”
If only we, too, could discover such a pure, contained Eden for humanity,
our own fruitful strip of soil between river and rock.
For our hearts have always exceeded us, as our ancestors’ did.
And we can no longer trust our own eyes, when gazing at godlike bodies, our hearts find a greater repose.
Je te chante
A toute heure
Religieusement
Les très grandes moultes belles et riches heures de Ma Dame

Je te les chante en latin à matines  
Ave Maria Plena Gratia
Je te les chante à laudes
Tota pulchra es amica
Je te chante en latin les petites heures, les heures de pucelle
Je te les chante à prime
Regina caeli letare
Je te les chante à tierce
Benedicta es tu filia
Je te les chante à sexte
Obsecro te domina sancta Maria, Mater dei, pietate plenissima
Je te les chante à none
O intemerata et in eternum benedicta

Je te chante en latin les grandes heures, les donzelles
Je te les chante à vêpres
Alleluia Hosanna Musa Benedicta tu in Musis
Je te les chante à complies
Salve Regina Mater misericordiae vita dulcedo et spes nostra salve

Et dans le silence de ma cellule
Noire et blanche
Je te renouvelle
Après l'office des complies
Sans antiphonaire et sans graduel
Mes voeux d'humilité, de pauvreté et chasteté
Ecoute la prière grégorienne
De ton moine cistercien, ton baryton orthodoxe,
Ton serviteur, ton esclave, ton Musc
Nu et sincère sans habit et sans scapulaire
Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae
Penmann Jun 2019
Smile your Marie Kondo smile on me-
Just smile and pretend it can be done
She is a tank against common sense. Invasion of clear mind.
I never tidy up, my life's a mess.
Marie Kondo though makes me feel even less.
Completely disarmed my will to feel.
Brandon Conway Aug 2018
Dance Loïe Fuller
Serpentine angel, how you
Coil and capture
MacKenzie Warren Jul 2018
i've always hated my middle name
lacking in individuality
a commonplace name
given to half the girls in my graduating class
it never sounded right
it never seemed like it fit
it didn't feel like it belonged to me
that is until you started to use it
my first name foreign to your lips
and somehow it made flowers grow around my rib-cage
restricting my lungs, causing me to catch my breath
in a good way
it made my cheeks rosy
for when you uttered those 5 letters
it sounded like wind chimes
a hummingbird's wings
my heart matching the rhythm
53 beats per second
for it was something no one else called me
a name far from unique
but you made it sound beautiful
you made it charming
a gesture so endearing
Marie Love Feb 2018
I gave you the benefit of the doubt.
Shame on me.
I knew,
That everything will come to light.
Shame on you.
Marie Love Feb 2018
Feeling like I’m giving too much to a man who no longer loves me.
Do i stay?
Or should i do him the favor and walk away?
Marie Love Feb 2018
I knew what it was when i found out,
I just didn’t want to listen.
You laying in her bed, every night,
I knew you was kissing.
Smelled her perfume on your shirt,
Your guilt on your lips,
When you kiss me goodbye,
Knowing you’re returning to her every night.
And i knew.
I just never wanted to believe it was trust,
That this was coming from you..
tamia Jan 2018
Antonia, it’s time to rise today
Your breakfast is ready, your tutor waits
“Time is running", mama says
There’s much to learn as a princess

Antonia, follow whatever we please
Stand tall and straight, hide your scarred knees
You’re no longer a little girl
You’re bound to be a queen of the world

Antonia, quickly, put on your shoes
Lace your corset so it’s anything but loose
If you’re short of breath, you’ll have to wait
A true royal must never be late

Antonia, there’s no more time to play
With your chin up, follow what we say
You must learn to be a trophy of France
To walk with grace, to speak, to dance

Antonia, stop laughing like a witch
Don’t be a disgrace, you’re not a *****
You’ll change your name and all in between
Marie Antoinette is who you are as queen

Marie Antoinette, with beauty from the gods,
You’ll marry a man you’ve never loved
You’re off to France, now say goodbye,
You are to leave everything behind

Marie Antoinette, you lover of life,
With your luxury and power, your kingdom’s in strife
As you live your own Versailles delusion
Your kingdom is brewing a violent revolution

Marie Antoinette, do you remember the sweet days of sixteen?
Here it all ends, with a cruel guillotine.
Antonia, free spirit, never meant to be
A girl chained by royalty, a reigning queen.
the tragedy of marie antoinette
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