we who have no will, no world:
marked with the marks of the latest anxiety,
disfigure, stripped of leaves.
Around us swirls the dust of the cities,
the garbage clings to us.
We are shunned as if contaminated,
thrown away like broken pots, like bones,
the last year's calender.
And yet if our Earth needed to
she could weave us together like roses
and make of us a garland
For each being is cleaner than washed stones
and endlessy yours, and like an animal
who knows already in its first blind moments
its need for one thing only-
to let ourselves be poor like that - as we truly are
Photo: Child and her mother, FSA Rehabilitation Clients, 1939 by Dorothea Lange
Rainer M. Rilke had a long relationship with the russian/german writer Lou Andreas von Salomé who was 13 years older than him. I am reading her works these days and she was an amazing personality. Also the letters she exchanged with Rilke from 1897 to 1926 are interesting. She was also Nietzsche 's and Freud's lover. Had to be indeed an interesting and very clever woman for capturing the interest of such persons! Franca Panizza
ReplyDeleteOh thank you very much for the above. I like his work a lot the way he deals with cocepts of sisbelief, solitude and uncertainty. He met Lou when he was 21, they quickly became besotted, but this is the nature of love and desire, von Salome would also become his friend , protege and mentor...in a relationship that would last for the rest of his life. All the best.
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