Poem For The Day

                   

The Sonnets To Orpheus: XIX

By Rainer Maria Rilke

Though the world keeps changing its form
as fast as a cloud, still
what is accomplished falls home
to the Primeval.

Over the change and the passing,
larger and freer,
soars your eternal song,
god with the lyre.

Never has grief been possesed,
never has love been learned,
and what removes us in death

is not revealed.
Only the song through the land
hallows and heals.

(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)

In this ever changing world, there is forever a constant mystery that perhaps is best captured in the "primeval" because the "primeval" captures nothing... We hear it in the songs of birds and in the whispering of the wind.  We glimpse it in the snowfall and the woods. We feel it in our hearts.   It is a beautiful mystery that is beyond us and yet it is the very thing that grounds us.  It is what "hallows and heals."  If this sounds foreign, it is only because I lack the words. If you venture out into the woods today, breathe in and listen.