You Playmates of Mine: Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will find them gradually, without noticing it, and live along some distant day into the answer. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
You Playmates of Mine
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,
spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.
Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
horses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in the world was real?
Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.
Rainer Maria Rilke (In memoriam Egon von Rilke)
You Playmates of Mine
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from childhood of long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,
spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.
Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
horses surrounded us, solid but untrue--and none
of them ever knew us. What in the world was real?
Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . But sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.
Rainer Maria Rilke (In memoriam Egon von Rilke)
