The First Elegy

If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?

And if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy us.

Every angel is terrifying in that way.
So I hold myself back,
and let my scream for help
be swallowed by sobbing.

Oh, to what, then, can we turn
in our need?
Not to an angel. Not to a person.
Animals, perceptive as they are,
notice that we are not really at home
in this world of ours. Perhaps there is
a particular tree we see everyday on the hillside,
or a street we have walked,
or the warped loyalty of a habit
that does not abandon us.

Oh, and night, the night, when wind
hurls the universe at our faces.
For whom is night not there?
Longed for and softly disappointing,
it envelopes each solitary heart.
Is night easier for lovers, who
can hide from their fate in each other?

Do you still not know how little endures?
Fling the nothing you are grasping
out into the spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds
will feel in their flight
how the air has expanded.

Can you see? Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension
so that, released, it travels farther.

For there is nowhere to remain.

- Rainer Maria Rilke -