Daylight Savings Time doesn't really save us anything.
It merely shifts an hour of light from morning to evening,
or an hour of darkness from evening to morning --
whichever way you want to look at it.
Prayer #1
The hour bows down and stirs me
with a clear and ringing stroke;
my senses tremble. I feel that I can —
and I seize the forming day.
Nothing was yet done before I beheld it,
and every becoming stood still;
my ways of seeing are ripe, and, like a bride,
to each one comes the thing each wills.
Nothing is too small for me, and I love it anyway
and paint it on the golden base and large —
and hold it high; and I don’t know whose
soul this might yet free . . .
On the 20th of September in the evening after a lengthy rainstorm,
when the sun suddenly broke through the forest’s dark canopy and through me.
Prayer #20
My life is not this steep hour
in which You see me hurrying so.
I am a tree standing before what I once was;
I am only one of my many mouths,
and, at that, the first to close.
I am the stillness between two notes
that don't easily harmonize,
because the note Death wants to lift itself up . . .
But in the dark interval both notes come
trembling, to join as one . . .
and the song remains, beautiful.
After this, the monk drew very near to God; on the same evening.
italics and ellipses in original text]
Both selections from Prayers of a Young Poet
written by by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
translated by Mark S. Burrows
Many thanks to my dear friend and spiritual advisor
Nancy C. Tiederman
for sending me this latest translation of Rilke's Prayers
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