I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.


-- Rainer Maria Rilke
(in Rilke's Book of Hours,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.  For all things
sing you:  at times
we just hear them more clearly.


-- Rainer Maria Rilke
(in Rilke's Book of Hours,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.


-- Rainer Maria Rilke
(in Rilke's Book of Hours,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know:  am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

-- Rainer Maria Rilke
(in Rilke's Book of Hours,
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)