from Rilke's French: "But it is purer to die"

a translation from the French of Rainer Maria Rilke

click here to read

winter grass, again

late winter, wind in dry grass, seed pods

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.

when the cities lie at the monster's feet

Shine, Perishing Republic

While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens,

I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother; and through the spring exultances, ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.

You making haste haste on decay: not blameworthy; life is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: meteors are not needed less than mountains: shine, perishing republic.

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet there are left the mountains.

And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man, a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught – they say – God, when he walked on earth.


Robinson Jeffers


As Donald Trump proceeds with the putrefaction of American life, installing White Nationalist propagandists in the White House, we look for sanctuary. Here it is
--- rock and water, sky and poetry. These things are not eternal. They are not much at all, compared with the stars. But they will easily outlast any vulgar, bigoted con-man.