For my magician...

(rilke)
But the boy must go on. In silence the ancient Sorrow
brings him to the ravine,
where a whiteness gleams in the moonlight: the Source of Joy.
Reverently
she gives it its name. – In the human world, she says,
it is a stream that bears you.
They stand at the mountain’s foot.
And she embraces him, weeping.

Alone he climbs, till lost to sight, in the mountains.
Out of the blankness of fate his steps return no sound.

*

But if they wished to waken a likeness in us, the endlessly dead,
perhaps they would point to the hazel’s empty catkins
that hang in the dry wind; or else the rain
that moistens earth’s dark soil in the early year.

And we, who think of happiness ascending,
would with consternation
know the rapture that almost overwhelms us,
when happiness falls.



rilke makes me cry. which makes me feel alive. and not numb. complete poems by him: http://www.geocities.com/Paris/LeftBank/4027/duino.html