Love Poems to God, II, 22
You are the future,
the red sky before sunrise
over the fields of time.
You are the cock’s crow when night is done,
you are the dew and the bells of matins,
maiden, stranger, mother, death.
You create yourself in ever-changing shapes
that rise from the stuff of our days—
unsung, unmourned, undescribed,
like a forest we never knew.
You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.
To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.
-Rainer Maria Rilke from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
The poem expresses it all for me today. These lines especially sing to my heart: “. . .ris(ing) from the stuff of our days—/unsung, unmourned, undescribed,/like a forest we never knew.” In the days when I don’t have the energy to even cry out, sacredness is woven through my sorrow and hidden tears and rises into the world like the fiery clouds at the hinges of the day.
-Christine Valters Paintner @ Abbey of the Arts
(photo from a trip last summer to Kauai)
