Childlike Spring

The Easter Bunny?

Spring has come again.
The Earth is like
a child who knows
poems by heart.

~ Rilke ~
from Sonnets to Orpheus
~ translated by Edward Snow ~

I love this whimsical snail planter (found in the British garden of my parents - in - law) and the above bunny rabbit statuette (belonging to my British sister - in - law). Both figurines, as well as their attendant flowers, exemplify the child - like nature of Spring that Rilke captures in his simile of Earth as a poetic youngster. The following, also by Rilke, is a more serious poem for the Easter season; but keep in mind that, despite the maturity of its intropection, "this is how children cherish You":

Prayer #12

I believe in everything that has not been said,
I want to free my most pious feelings;
what no one has ever dared to want
will suddenly become my nature.

If this is impudent, my God, forgive me.
But with this I want to tell You
that my noblest power should be an instinct,
and thus without anger and without hesitation --
this is how children cherish You.

With this flood, with this flow
into the broad arms of the open sea,
with this expansive return,
I want to bear witness to You; I want to proclaim You
like none before.

And if this is pride, the let me be proud
in my prayer,
which stands so earnest and alone
before Your shadowed brow.

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

Ready for the Shift

Surely Rilke would have been quick to observe that
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.

[Concluding notes from Rilke;
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

Wind from a Leaf

Flowering Cherry with Poem Slips
Japanese painter, Tosa Mitsuoki, 1617 – 1691
If only I'd known this poem
back when Y2K was all the rage:

from Prayer #8

I'm living just as the century departs.
One feels the wind from a large leaf
that God and you and I had written on,
which turns above by hands no one knows.

One feels the radiance of a new page
on which everything could still come to be. ~ 1899

by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Prayers of a Young Poet
translated by Mark S. Burrows

Mitsuoki ~ Autumn Maples

Previous March First Posts

2010: Kiss Me & Kiss Today

2011: My Vegetable Love

2012: Love However Brief

2013: Beyond Ideas

2014: The First [Mild] Day of March

Thanks George Sfedu!

Or ~ more like what we're experiencing today:
Snow in March, 1904
by Russian Impressionist
Igor Grabar, 1871 - 1960

Ancestors

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Paternal Grandparents

~ Recent Family History ~
a poem
by Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Looking out at us from their photographs,
mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles,
now dead for forty - five years or more,
don't recognize us, can't even imagine us.
And we are helpless to penetrate the safety
of their innocence . . .
from Collected Poems (237)

Maternal Grandparents

" . . . we start [that which] we will not live to see,
just as our ancestors could not live to see us.
And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,
as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,
and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time."
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Letters to a Young Poet (62)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

See more
"Ancestors"
on the
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker
A fortnightly [every 14th & 28th]
literary blog of connection & coincidence; custom & ceremony

Ripening Like A Tree: Arbor Day

Being an artist means: not numbering and counting,
but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap,
and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid
that afterward summer may not come.
It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient,
who are there as if eternity lay before them,
so unconcernedly silent and vast.
I learn it every day of my life,
learn it with pain I am grateful for:
patience is everything!

from Letter Four
23 April 1903 [Shakespeare's 339th Birthday!]
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
in Letters to a Young Poet
[click to read online]
Additional Excerpts
from Letters to a Young Poet:

Mental Beauty
Ancestors
************
Live the Questions
Gender Equity
************
Rilke and Maso
Holiday Thoughts

P.S. StoryPeople for Arbor Day

Read Before Thinking

"Access to knowledge is the supreme act
of truly great civilizations.
Of all the institutions that purport to do this,
free libraries stand virtually alone
in accomplishing this mission."
~ Toni Morrison ~



If you're looking for something to read, here's
what I've posted lately on Kitti's Book List:

Fresh Insights & Bursts of Clueness

Holiday Thoughts from Powell, Rilke and Maso

Another Year Over

And a New One Just Begun

Book Haven

Thanks to my sister Peg for sending me
one of these cool readerly shirts from Wonder Book!

Gender Equity

Singing People by Debra Frasier
from On the Day You Were Born

Excerpt from new post on Kitti's Book List
Rainer Maria Rilke: pp 77 - 78 . . . someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being. ~ 1904, from his Letters to a Young Poet

Carole Maso: p 37 . . . All the personal pronouns -- j/e, m/o, m/a, m/es -- are split to emphasize the disintegration of the self that occurs every time women speak male language. ~ 1993, from her novel AVA

*******************************I wonder if Rilke would be disappointed to see what a lengthy and hard - fought transformation it has become? I appreciate Maso's description of the so often unacknowledged and wearying disintegration. First comes the exclusive language; then comes the taxing enterprise of pulling yourself back together again, putting yourself into the picture, the self - integration that is not a given. Like hearing "father" and thinking "and mother." Or "brother" and "sister too." "Men" -- "and women." "Mankind" -- "oh yeah, that means me."

I think the beautiful song "Let There Be Peace On Earth," (sung here by Gladys Knight in 2008 at the National Memorial Day Concert, Washington, D.C.) is a perfect example of what Maso is talking about here. I've loved this song since Junior High when we sang it in Girls' Chorus (emphasis added for irony!), but it requires some mental gymnastics to repair the damage done by the gender exclusivity of that key phrase:

"With God as our Father, brothers all are we
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony."
These words are chosen as a fitting observance of a National event, yet by their very nature, they omit half the people in our country. Okay, I can fix that in my head; but should I have too? I can try to believe that "when you say "men" you mean "women" too; that doesn't always work. But one thing I know for sure, without Gender Equity, there is never going to be Peace on Earth.

Last Fruits

Fruit of the Vine Patio Night Light

Autumn Day
Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
bring them to ripeness, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine. . .

from the poem
by Rainer Marie Rilke

my favorite lines from various translations:
gratefulness
inward / outward
plough
poemhunter

You can read more Rilke
on my book list blog & on my fortnightly literary blog

Live the Questions

Girl at Writing Table
by Kate Greenaway (1846 - 1901)
English children's book illustrator
"If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge. . . .

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. *Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."from Letter Four: 16 July 1903
in Letters to a Young Poet (to read online)
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

I also like this alternate translation from Stephen Mitchell:

"Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing it,
live your way into the answer."
As I wrote a few years back, my inclination to blog is fueled by "those moments when Life offers its own theme to a strand of apparently accidental events, and everything hangs together for a moment in such an uncanny way that you'd swear it was all planned out somehow!" The latest thrilling trail of irresistible coincidence that I just had to follow concerns the above quotation by Rilke.

For more on this ingenious web of connection and coincidence,
see my new post "Mental Beauty"
on The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

DYFJ

Thanks to Purdue for Permission to Re-print
I have to admire my son Sam (#43; far right) who spends the summer getting up most mornings at 5:45 for a couple hours of weight training and then returns in the afternoon for a couple more hours of kicking practice. He shared with me a little mantra that he learned from one of his coaches on how to stay focused when all the world around seems out of whack: "DYFJ" (just do your f---ing job)!

With that in mind, I have assembled the following collection, all related to the theme of work and, more importantly, DYFJ!

"Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do.
Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do."

Mark Twain
from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
************************
“The Master of the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which; he simply pursues his vision of excellence in whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.”

Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

************************I Want A Lot

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that so work and feel thirst.

You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.

[Alt. translation:
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.]

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

[Alt. translation:
You are not dead yet, it’s not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.]

Rainer Maria Rilke / translated by Robert Bly

************************To Be Of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

Marge Piercy
************************

Click to See More Football Photos

Life's Calm Secret

You see, I want a lot.
Perhaps I want everything:
the darkness that comes with every infinite fall
and the shivering blaze of every step up.

So many live on and want nothing
and are raised to the rank of prince
by the slippery ease of their light judgments.

But what you love to see are faces
that so work and feel thirst.

You love most of all those who need you
as they need a crowbar or a hoe.

You have not grown old, and it is not too late
to dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

from the Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Robert Bly

Dagmar's Birthday

Lunch Friends: Dagmar, Kitti, Katy, Cathy
(My Birthday Last Year)
I dedicate this post to the memory of my friend Dagmar Murray, who was born on April 13th, 1959.

Another friend ~ www.jandonley.com ~ also born in April and often mentioned on my blogs, sent a link to the following poem the other day on facebook. Jan wasn't sending the poem, which she describes as "short and so, so beautiful," just to me. Nor did she send it in connection with Dagmar, who died last month, sadly and suddenly. However, as so often happens, Jan's message seemed to come at precisely the right time, thus I share Rilke's poem here today in honor of Dagmar's 52nd birthday:

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
from his Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
translation by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
recited on public radio by Joanna Macy

Read more for
Dagmar's Birthday
On The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

Happy New Year!

"And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been." --Rilke

SEE ALSO FAST AWAY THE OLD YEAR PASSES!

@ MY FORTNIGHTLY BLOG