Evening {poetry for lent}

Over the weekend my friend Karen returned a book she'd borrowed - Rilke's Book of Images, the first book of poems that I ever loved. And also over the weekend my friend Dan wrote at the Relief Journal blog about Rilke's observation that even between the closest people infinite distances exist - and how that idea might enlighten our understanding of marriage.

Clearly, it was time to revisit the poet of my youth, give admittance to the adolescent emotions and see how well the words stand up against the test of time. Here's an old favorite:


Evening
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the evening puts on the garments
held for it by a rim of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands divide from you,
one going heavenward, one that falls;

and leave you, to neither quite belonging,
not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,
 not quite so surely pledging the eternal
as that which grows star each night and climbs --

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)
your life afraid and huge and ripening,
so that it, now bound in and now embracing,
grows alternately stone in you and star.