a prayer for unison

a poem is online at Heron Tree

click here

Rilke: Let everything happen to you

Gott spricht zu jedem nur, eh er ihn macht,
dann geht er schweigend mit ihm aus der Nacht.
Aber die Worte, eh jeder beginnt,
diese wolkigen Worte, sind:

Von deinen Sinnen hinausgesandt,
geh bis an deiner Sehnsucht Rand;
gib mir Gewand.
Hinter den Dingen wachse als Brand,
dass ihre Schatten, ausgespannt,
immer mich ganz bedecken.

Lass dir Alles geschehn: Schönheit und Schrecken.
Man muss nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.
Lass dich von mir nicht trennen.
Nah ist das Land,
das sie das Leben nennen.

Du wirst es erkennen
an seinem Ernste.

Gib mir die Hand.



God speaks to each creature only before he makes it,
then walks silently with it out of the night.
But the words, before each begins,
those cloud-shrouded words, are:

Sent outward by your senses,
go to the limit of your longing;
and so clothe me.
Rise behind things like a fire,
so that their long-drawn shadows
cover me over.

Let everything happen to you: Beauty and Terror.
One must only keep going: no feeling is final.
Don't stray far from me.
Nearby is the land
that they call life.

You will know it
by its graveness.

Give me your hand.


-- Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Hours
(my translation, rather literal and quick)

mni wiconi

These images, in which I find a strange, abstract beauty, are cropped and enlarged sections of an aerial news photograph (by Tom Stromme/The Bismarck Tribune) showing the Oceti Sakowin camp, where people have gathered to protest the Dakota Access pipeline on federal land, Monday, Feb. 13, 2017, in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. A federal judge on Monday refused to stop construction on the last stretch of the Dakota Access pipeline. The honourable efforts of the Dakota people to protect their land and water will almost certainly fail, under the weight of corporate interests, paired with the federal government's unsleeping insistence toward empire.

Here, in this time of fade and dissolution, we are surrounded by the long, somber rhythms of many things dying.

One can see the full image here.