"rilke" poems
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shimmering blaze of every step up.
So many live on and want nothing,
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.
But what you love to see are faces
that do work and feel thirst.
You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a ***
You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.
*Rainer Maria Rilke / The Book of the Hours
(translated by Robert Bly: German)*
S T, 20 July 2013
Jul 20, 2013
Jul 20, 2013 at 10:38 AM UTC
Whoever has no house now will never have one.
Whoever is alone will stay alone
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
And wander on the boulevards, up and down...
- from Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke
Its stain is everywhere.
The sharpening air
of late afternoon
is now the colour of tea.
Once-glycerined green leaves
burned by a summer sun
are brittle and ochre.
Night enters day like a thief.
And children fear that the beautiful daylight has gone.
Whoever has no house now will never have one.
It is the best and the worst time.
Around a fire, everyone laughing,
brocaded curtains drawn,
nowhere-anywhere-is more safe than here.
The whole world is a cup
one could hold in one's hand like a stone
warmed by that same summer sun.
But the dead or the near dead
are now all knucklebone.
Whoever is alone will stay alone.
Nothing to do. Nothing to really do.
Toast and tea are nothing.
Kettle boils dry.
Shut the night out or let it in,
it is a cat on the wrong side of the door
whichever side it is on. A black thing
with its implacable face.
To avoid it you
will tell yourself you are something,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.
Even though there is bounty, a full harvest
that sharp sweetness in the tea-stained air
is reserved for those who have made a straw
fine as a hair to **** it through-
fine as a golden hair.
Wearing a smile or a frown
God's face is always there.
It is up to you
if you take your wintry restlessness into the town
and wander on the boulevards, up and down.
7.8k
O, kadiliman na aking pinagmulan
Higit kitang sinasamba kaisa sa apoy na
bumabalot sa mundo,
sapagkat ang apoy ay
bumubuo ng isang malaking bola ng ilaw para sa lahat
at wala nang sinuman ang makakakilala sa iyo.
Ngunit ang kadiliman, pinagsasanib nito ang lahat:
mga hugis, mga apoy, mga hayop, ako,
o, kay husay nitong pagsamahin ang lahat!—
kapangyarihan at mga tao—
at maaaring may matinding enerhiya na
papalapit na sa akin.
Sinasamba ko ang gabi.
Dec 3, 2014
Dec 3, 2014 at 6:23 AM UTC
The short-order cook and the dishwasher
argue the relative merits
of Rilke’s Elegies
against Eliot’s Four Quartets,
but the delivery man who brings eggs
suggests they have forgotten Les fleurs
du mal and Baudelaire. The waitress
carrying three plates and a coffee ***
can’t decide whom she loves more—
Rimbaud or Verlaine,
William Blake or William Wordsworth.
She refills the rabbi’s cup
(he’s reading Rumi),
asks what he thinks of Arthur Whaley.
In the booth behind them, a fat woman
feeds a small white poodle in her lap,
with whom she shares her spoon.
"It’s Rexroth’s translations of the Japanese,"
she says, "that one can’t live without:
May those who are born after me
Never travel such roads of love."
The revolving door proffers
a stranger in a long black coat, lost in the madhouse poems of John Clare.
As he waits to be seated,
the woman who owns the place
hands him a menu
in which he finds several handwritten poems
By Hafiz, Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.
The lunch hour’s crowded—
the owner wonders
if the stranger might share
my table. As he sits,
I put a finger to my lips,
and with my eyes ask him
to listen with me
to the young boy and the young girl
two tables away
taking turns reading aloud
the love poems of Pablo Neruda.
4.9k
Sanguine
Choleric
Melancholic
Phlegmatic
Phlegmatic
Melancholic
Choleric
Sanguine
Blood oranges
And hibiscus tea
White wine
Carcrash memory
Hypertensive
He straps me down on the table
This is for my own good.
Too much blood they say,
Too much red wine too much liquid
Too much
My hand is swollen
My stomach distended
The vein in my forehead is bulging
Too much blood
A needle
A leech
A pen
Blood oranges
White wine
A needle is a leech is a pen
Is what the doctor ordered
He straps me to the desk
This is for my own good
A cure
Too much blood
Too much tea
Too many memories
Too many thoughts
Hypertensive
Sanguine
They say
They hand me the scalpel
And show me the line
Too much
I’ve had too too much red wine
To be doing this
A pen a leech a needle
A bucket of blood
A novel
Sanguine
Melancholic
Choleric
Phlegmatic
This is the cure
This is for my own good
Too much much blood
They hand me the pen
I’ve had too too many
Blood oranges
To be doing this
A scalpel is a pen
Is a leech is a needle
A bucket of blood is a novel
(Bleeding is the cure)
I bleed.
Jul 19, 2015
Jul 19, 2015 at 2:58 PM UTC
Liebes-Lied (“Love Song”)
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
How can I withhold my soul so that it doesn’t touch yours?
How can I lift mine gently to higher things, alone?
Oh, I would gladly find something lost in the dark
in that inert space that fails to resonate until you vibrate.
There everything that moves us, draws us together like a bow
enticing two taut strings to sing together with a simultaneous voice.
Whose instrument are we becoming together?
Whose, the hands that excite us?
Ah, sweet song!
Original text:
Liebes-Lied
Wie soll ich meine Seele halten, daß
sie nicht an deine rührt? Wie soll ich sie
hinheben über dich zu andern Dingen?
Ach gerne möcht ich sie bei irgendwas
Verlorenem im Dunkel unterbringen
an einer fremden stillen Stelle, die
nicht weiterschwingt, wenn deine Tiefen schwingen.
Doch alles, was uns anrührt, dich und mich,
nimmt uns zusammen wie ein Bogenstrich,
der aus zwei Saiten eine Stimme zieht.
Auf welches Instrument sind wir gespannt?
Und welcher Geiger hat uns in der Hand?
O süßes Lied.
Keywords/Tags: German, translation, Rainer Maria Rilke, love, song, music, soul, vibrate, vibration, dark, space, darkness, instrument, bow, strings, hands, voice
Feb 25, 2020
Feb 25, 2020 at 6:26 PM UTC
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
***** the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Book of Hours, II 1
Nov 3, 2012
Nov 3, 2012 at 1:36 PM UTC
It hurts, it hurts more than when I ended up in hospital, I slipped from the curved metal stairs and cracked all my ribs,
You sat on the frosty steel chair and fed me warm leek soup all day, I was high and *we cracked *** jokes all through the visiting hours*.
Or when I fractured my right leg and couldn’t walk for months, you wheelchaired me to all my revered museums,
And when it rained that evening and I felt trapped and pathetic in the ****** wheelchair,
*You lifted me up and twirled me around and kissed every sore spot in my body including my terrible heart,
Till I started laughing, all giddy and intoxicated with your droplets brushed lips*
Or when I burnt my fingers while making green curry and you had to take me to infirmary,
They bandaged my fingers in bubblegum pink gauze an told me the scars would never leave and I wouldn’t be able to write or hold you for a week,
You made me churros that whole week with Swiss choc dipping and kissed all my scars away, painting vibrant swallows on them.
I loved you, so much it made me insane, but it also made me breathe. Funny, how the direction of the wind has changed.
It hurts now, more than it ever did, I stand on the steps of metropolitan museum of art and the ache in my veins magnifies,
The longing ablaze like all your plaid shirts, nirvana records and all the synthetic lilies you gave me, quoting they will never dry up, Like our love will always remain, burning on my terrace
Funny how, now I don’t believe a sentence you said.
I sing all the songs we loved for the last time, to get it all out, of my system and bleeding heart.
My lips get greedy for the praised lyrics and midnight kisses.
The rocking chair in the balcony swinging in the breezy night I hope it’s you, my eyes left disappointed at the empty gloomy sight
My heart getting accustomed to Bukowski instead of much devoured Rilke.
Sometimes in life you never understand why they left, why it ended all of a sudden?
When did you stop loving me and when all my importance vanished into thin air like you did?
Sometimes all that is left to do is accept it and move on, and that may be the seemingly impossible part.
Sometimes you just have to pour water to the vivid fire for putting gasoline was proving to be poisonous and CHOKING.
Jul 6, 2013
Jul 6, 2013 at 6:07 AM UTC
Capri
roofless cubes, spidery with wire,
cakes of azure and enzian;
above at the Villa San Michele
Rilke smiles down at the broken beaches,
coves of defiant waves, compacted sea
Pompeii
a chessboard of honest stones
open to a sky of hushed shouts;
we huddle in a ***** frame
of another life, a stopped day
Napoli
warm and secret, olive-eyed
you make a new face
as we gaze from a bus:
an act of moment
Apr 29, 2017
Apr 29, 2017 at 7:36 AM UTC
. . . go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit,
your house is the last before the infinite, . . .
(from Rainer Maria Rilke's "Eingang", MacIntyre translation)
The light which strikes my retina
as I look at the Great Galaxy in Andromeda
left there two million years ago.
(Hominids made tools from stone then, but had not yet
learned the use of fire.
Genetic material from certain of these hominids has been passed
from one being to another and now is in my own body.)
Millennia from now, humans who have
colonized the farthest reaches of our galaxy,
laboriously creating and maintaining Earth-like atmospheres,
will marvel that there once was a place so perfectly suited to
human life
that such labor was unnecessary. (Just as we marvel that orchids,
whose precise temperature and humidity requirements would seem to necessitate a greenhouse, grow wild in the Amazon.)
I cannot believe in a personal God,
intervening in human affairs, but stand in awe
of the terrible force which set the stars and galaxies in motion
--strewing them like so much confetti--;
the life-force running through each living creature,
as straight and true as a ray of light from that galaxy in Andromeda,
willing us to live, grow and be fruitful.
Jul 30, 2017
Jul 30, 2017 at 4:04 PM UTC
ALL THE IMPORTANT POETS
One day I found all the important poets -
Shakespeare, Bukowski, Dickinson and Rilke
partying in the park drinking Coronas,
feeding pigeons on the green.
Astonished I queried,
"You are all my thought heroes, and yet you laze about.
"Shouldn’t you be writing something famous?"
And they erupted in a literate cacophony of guffaws,
their eyes tearing,
their cheeks shining red with mirth.
Shakespeare turned to me and said,
"Forget it kid !
Meter, metaphor, rhythm and rhyme -
it’s all just groundlessness.
All the adjectives in the world divined just so
only lead to a place in your heart
you’ll never really understand anyway.
It’s simply a mystery, ineffable."
Bukowski tried to ask Rilke about the letters
he'd written to that frustrated young poet,
but he was so drunk on cooking sherry
he could only mumble, gesticulate and grin.
And then sweet Emily said,
"Yes. William is right.
Rainer Marie tried to explain it.
Charles tried to drink into it,
yet it remains the glass bead game -
ungraspable by dearest turn of phrase.
So we have decided to put down our pens
and take a breather."
She quietly handed me the bag of crumbs,
suggesting I toss a few here and there
for the pigeon's lollygagging by.......
"They're hungry, the simple little dears," she said.
Jan 4, 2012
Jan 4, 2012 at 11:19 PM UTC
(from "To: Mimi Romanelli"
~indebted to suggestion of
https://hellopoetry.com/MacGM/
for filling me up one of the trillions of missing datapoints
in my slowly diminishing insights & missing knowledges
<>
"I am happy, Dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms. Finally: happy."
from the poem by Rilke
"To: Mimi Romanelli"
see notes
'~~~'
so worthy of my/our attentions,
his reflections on loss, grief and mortality,
for in the natural course of this poet's story,
the interplay of this shopping list of preoccupations,
foremost on this temporal frontal lobe in these waning days
of my perhaps, last summery summary,
that falls upon your eyes with
my guilt that you have clicked upon
this e~pistle, in and un~
tentionally & tensionally
thus demanding & tendering post-haste
my apology
so be advised, be learned, and query why
an essay on ending mortality should be
be finished with a concluding a
"Finally: happy."
by breaching this poet Rilke essay,
one discovers
this poet sees through the storms of his preoccupations,
"the red of his blood,"
because he loves
another human, being,
so many would agree,
yet so few are so certain,
as Rilke,
and yet,
"*It is still always that death which continues inside of me, which works in me, which transforms my heart, which deepens the red of my blood, which weighs down the life that had been ours so that it may become a bittersweet drop coursing through my veins and penetrating everything, and which ought to be mine forever.
And while I am completely engulfed in my sadness, I am happy to sense that you exist,
Beautiful. I am happy to have flung myself
without fear into your beauty just as a bird flings itself into space. I am happy, Dear, to have walked with steady faith on the waters of our uncertainty all the way to that island which is your heart and where pain blossoms.*
Finally: happy."
<>
Writ the last week of August,
and the first of September
2025
Sep 2, 2025
Sep 2, 2025 at 12:49 PM UTC
The leaves are falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no".
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Sep 14, 2014
Sep 14, 2014 at 10:05 PM UTC
I love all beginnings, despite their anxiousness and their uncertainty, which belong to every commencement. If I have earned a pleasure or a reward, or if I wish that something had not happened; if I doubt the worth of an experience and remain in my past--then I choose to begin at this very second.
Begin what? I begin. I have already thus begun a thousand lives.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Early Journals)
Jan 1, 2015
Jan 1, 2015 at 12:28 PM UTC
If we do not inhabit our verses,
what is the use of writing?
Eminescu, Rilke, Byron and Mandelstam
succeeded.
Grapes squeezed in a timepress.
If we are not alive in our images
what remains of poets?
Dew and ink,
Labour, symmetries?
Blood is the only colour
That can’t be erased from a book.
Adrian Popescu, from My Cup of Light
translated by Lidia Vianu and Anne Stewart
Jan 3, 2016
Jan 3, 2016 at 6:59 AM UTC
Over this I vacillate:
The writing down of verse,
Wealth of language distillate
Quench and cause my thirst.
Easy enough to hesitate
When errands need be run,
Either way I procrastinate
Leaving the other undone.
For quiet I equivocate
Time and time again, for
It is bliss to terminate
The what, the where, the when.
Sometimes I stew in stalemate
Two webs entreat be spun:
Revel in stillness or illustrate,
I pay with time for one.
Rilke said discriminate
If one must write or not,
To breath to write to oscillate
Conundrum of my plot.
Awareness and artistry bifurcate
My will in two extremes,
Yet I know when conjugate
They vivify the means.
Unsure if it is designate
I muse and metaphor,
I know with thrill words compensate
When they begin to roar.
What is the thing that animates
This soul to write a poem,
Passion to note and formulate
Or to be loved at home?
Aug 13, 2010
Aug 13, 2010 at 8:25 AM UTC
If your daily life seems of no account, don't blame it; blame yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its treasures. For the creative artist there is no impoverishment and no worthless place. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet
Jul 27, 2014
Jul 27, 2014 at 7:35 PM UTC
sleeping waking swallowing breathe in breathe out in out in out breathing breathing breathing through the heat through the wind through the hurt and dreaming grows so maddening and praying so desperate rainer i hear you your monsoon tears pattering on roof slowly wearing away my pièce de résistance in a perfect world everything imperfect would feel perfect belonging through the cold through the damp through the chill there are no more mountains barely a tree nothing dares to stand nowhere a tower 2 eyes too many hungry strangers beg taunt rob who knows the way what sign? the sun defiantly stares rude invasive heavy summer glare women glance beyond smile shimmering for someone else walking running racing towards autumn cooling in the place where sad women know trouble respecting women when they do not respect themselves i love women so deeply and courage has grown so weary and longing so great i bow to you rainer through the dark through the light through the dark
Jun 15, 2010
Jun 15, 2010 at 5:49 AM UTC
Rilke is wrong
Life isn't right
There is too much pain
Too much hurt
Not enough light
The darkness consumes
It cannot be beat
One must just stand all alone
Shaking from head down to feet
He has to fight the outside
To improve the within
The bleakness is heavy
His strength is wearing thin
How much longer can he fight
To feel goodness and warmth
When wrong seems so easy
Cold, evil winds blow in from the north
Chilled to the bone
From a murderous gust
He digs deep in his brain
To remember to trust
Memories spring to life
The blackness fades to grey
His face smiles a bit
And suddenly, it is not such a horrible day
His soul begins to warm
He envisions a time
When someone picked him up so high
His spirit continues to climb
All darkness is gone now
The gloomy shadow has passed
Sunshine has replaced it
Out it has been cast
It is not finished forever
This he surely knows
But next time he will be ready
To stand firm until over it blows
Life may not be right
But perhaps it's not wrong
He realizes this now
And right now
He is immeasurably strong
May 18, 2016
May 18, 2016 at 2:22 AM UTC
in Duino
no access for us
to rainer maria's view
across the sea
from the castello
a servant of
il principe
who owns the place
and whom we happen
not to know
bars our way
beyond the open gate
therefore:
no elegies
Mar 17, 2015
Mar 17, 2015 at 6:57 PM UTC
monsters exist
but only in my head
smetimes they appear in my dreams
but the scenes last only a split second
i've been drinking too much caffeine
and driving myself a little insane;
i've been listening to sad records and wishing in vain,
and i've been trying, trying, trying
but all i've done is cry
and i've been doing my best fixing up holes in my soul
but still my passions leak - out they go and disappear
it's been a strange year
Rilke said you go through important changes while you're sad
i hope so, i hope he's right
because i've been sad for a long time
and i'm starting to think this isn't worth it
if someone loves me, won't they tell me?
won't you tell me before i shut off completely?
Aug 17, 2013
Aug 17, 2013 at 4:48 AM UTC
I I I I was immersed into Maria's mystic Veil
A relieving elegant relish of Rilke's mystic mist
Husked my binary perception as an Earthquake
Easily brimms off the mountainpeak white frozen blanket
And helps Angels to swoon for a magnificent time lapse speed-->
Up ornaments stiched with The Divine craft and Love on a
Flying carpet infatuated and melting from Sun's Immense impact
When making love twice a day, Lovingly fulfilled with an
Intimate bluhing beauty of dancing Clouds de Dawn trying to kiss
Dusk Cloudy deliverance. Resolve probably lied in many times
Read fluttering pages gazing Smiling Buddha who Knows of blissfi pi Lyrical Mandolin Elegies Obsessed With Seeking Answers By
Pressing against Many Hearts Foolishly Misinterpreted
Pointless Colouring As An Act Of Reciprocal Love To Central Black Portals Seeing Thee Gazed Into Intricate Reminiscing
Me of Tempus Fugit Fragile Sudden Sadness Easily Evoken By You
:::::
Dec 30, 2015
Dec 30, 2015 at 7:45 AM UTC
Der Panther ("The Panther")
by Rainer Maria Rilke
loose translation/interpretation by Michael R. Burch
His weary vision's so overwhelmed by iron bars,
his exhausted eyes see only blank Oblivion.
His world is not our world. It has no stars.
No light. Ten thousand bars. Nothing beyond.
Lithe, swinging with a rhythmic easy stride,
he circles, his small orbit tightening,
an electron losing power. Paralyzed,
soon regal Will stands stunned, an abject thing.
Only at times the pupils' curtains rise
silently, and then an image enters,
descends through arrested shoulders, plunges, centers
somewhere within his empty heart, and dies.
Keywords/Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, German, translation, sonnet, panther, cat, animal, nature, extended metaphor, analogy, allegory, freedom, eyes, vision, iron, bar, bars, cage, prison, world, star, light, starlight, stride, orbit, electron, atom, particle, power, will, paralyzed, impotent, abject, pupils, curtain, curtains, image, shoulder, shoulders, heart, emptiness, loneliness, alienation, death, void
Feb 25, 2020
Feb 25, 2020 at 6:55 AM UTC