Poetry for Transformation: Rainer Maria Rilke

Be patient toward all that is unresolved 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 seek for the answers that cannot be given

For you would not be able to live them

And the point is to live everything

Live the questions now

And perhaps without knowing it

You will live along some day into the answers

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,

in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:

I am only one of my many mouths

and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,

which are somehow always in discord

because deaths note wants to climb over-

but in the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.

And the song goes on, beautiful.

My life is not this steeply sloping hour,

in which you see me hurrying.

Much stands behind me: I stand before it like a tree:

I am only one of my many mouths

and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,

which are somehow always in discord

because deaths note wants to climb over-

but in the dark interval, reconciled,

They stay here trembling.

And the song goes on, beautiful.

A billion stars go spinning through the night,

Blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

Will be, when all the stars are dead.

If the angel deigns to come

it will be because you have convinced

her, not by tears but by your humble

resolve to be always beginning;

to be a beginner.

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