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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.
You, Darkness
You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circIe of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them! --
powers and people --
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.
Sonnets to Orpheus, Book II, N. 14
Behold the flowers, who are so faithful to the earth,
Taken from fate’s very edge, which we then endow with a fate -
But who knows this? If they regret their withering,
It is for us to become their remorse.
Everything wishes to float upwards. There go we, heavy burdens, this way and that,
We ourselves are inclined to be enchanted by the weighty, by the heavy.
Oh, what shrivelled teachers are we to things,
Which have succeeded at eternal youth.
If you were to take one thing into intimate slumber and be in its sleep,
Be deeply with the things -: oh how lightly it would come
Day after day, up from the communal depths..
And perhaps you might remain, would bloom and be praised
For your conversion, as one now resembling what is theirs,
All those silent sisters of the meadow and the wind.
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