Monday, December 15, 2008

Stones and Stars

    Sunset

    Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
    which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
    You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
    one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth.

    leaving you, not really belonging to either,
    not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
    not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
    that turns to a star each night and climbs-

    leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
    your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
    so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching
    out,

    one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next,
    a star.


    By Rainer Maria Rilke
    Translated by Robert Bly

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