Rilke and Me - two short poems

You Darkness

You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.

But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight-

and it is possible;

its great strength
is breaking into my body.

I have faith in the night.

Rainer Maria Rilke Trans. D.W.



Oh Heart –
You never imagined the good red road
lined with trees filtering
distant music and laughing voices,

would wind its way to this -
place of beauty and aloneness
where breath, tears, and pulls of longing

make a tender, yet savage, and melancholy sound.
Having now re-discovered
that you can hold

indescribable vistas of limitless love,
and explore depths of caves never-ending;

still you seep in silent solitary sorrow.

And yet joy,
trembling in the distance
beckons unfamiliar regions of your soul.

Faith tremulously reaches out and up and in;
Stretching - hoping to touch once more
another’s fingers in the width of this world.

And in that divine chalice of space and time
to discover again God within
a lover and a friend.


Stephanie Swink - Evergreen, CO 5-09