Childhood
by Rainer Maria Rilke
It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely –and why?
We’re still reminded–: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on
as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.
And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.
—————
The End
And that’s the End of the Poem
© Poetry Monster, 2021.
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René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke ( 1875 – 1926). an Austrian poet and novelist of great influence, he was born in Prague, a city in the Austrian Empire now occupied by the ethnofascist Czech statelet. Rilke’s command of the German language is brilliant, both his prose and poems are intensely lyrical and some believe that his work is infused with mysticism.