Rilke

I. We are right at the start, do you see.

As though before everything. With

a thousand and one dreams behind us and

no act.

II I can imagine no knowledge holier

than this:

that you must become a beginner.

Someone who writes the first word after a 

centuries-long

dash. 

Rainer Maria Rilke 
From Notes on the Melody of Things

Rilke

Rilke The Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell, found here

the first words

how odd to find myself going back to blogger, to blogging. But this will be a kind of chapbook - mainly of poems and scraps of writing that I like and want to keep in one place, so I don't have to trawl through my old blog, or worse, Fb to find that piece that connected to my heart.

And the first poem for this blog is one that I had to find by searching back through my old blog, textileseahorse, by one of my favourite poets - Rainer Maria Rilke.  

There is total silence. Upright in overgrown
paths stands the scent of bygone colour.
The sky holds back a long hard rain
The leaves climb stairways through the air.
                                                          Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Inner Sky poems, notes dreams by Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Damion Searls Godine NY 2010