What the Evening Reveals

© Photographer:Mark Ross | Agency: Dreamstime.com

I won't make it a habit to post poetry here, but I was going through a new book of poetry I got - a collection by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke - and his poem Evening was so exquisite, I wanted to share it with you. The translator is Stephen Mitchell.

Evening

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.