Day 10: "The Duino Elegies" Rainer Maria Rilke (translation by Gary Miranda)

[druidspell]

Fig tree: how long you've had meaning for me --
the way you almost skip over the blossoming
and then, without fanfare, pour your pure secret
into the fruit when its time arrives:
your branches bend like the pipes of a fountain,
forcing the sap downwards then up till it leaps
from sleep, only half-awake, to the joy
of its sweetest achievement. Look:
like the god into the swan.
But we
prolong the blossoming, and take such pride in it.
By the time we arrive at the core of our final fruit,
we're already betrayed. Only a few
have that strong impulse to action that allows them
to stand, already perfected and full,
when the urge to blossom comes like a tempting night-breeze,
softly touching the youth of their mouths and their eyelids;
heroes perhaps, and those who die young, those in whom
the gardener, Death, has twisted the veins
in a different direction. These plunge on ahead,
drawing their own smiles behind them,
like that team of chargers in front of the conquering king
in the delicate bas-reliefs at Karnak.

The hero strangely resembles those who die young.
The length of his life doesn't matter to him;
the climb is his whole existence. Again and again
his constant sense of risk takes the shape
of a new constellation, and he enters it.
Few could follow him there. But fate,
which keeps us wrapped in a dark, secret cloud,
grows inspired and sings him into the storm
of its roaring world. I've yet to hear anyone like him
when, in a sudden rushing of air, his ominous tone
goes through me.

And then how gladly I'd hide from this longing.
Oh if only I were a boy, and everything seemed possible --
if only I were propped up in the arms of my future,
reading about Samson, of how his mother at first
bore nothing, and, afterwards, everything.

O Mother, wasn't he a hero already, even inside you?
Didn't it start there, within, that great decision of his?
Thousands converged in the womb, anxious to be him,
but see how he picked and discarded, chose
and was able to do it. And if he tumbled columns,
it was when he broke from the world of your womb
into his narrower world, where he chose
and could do it again.

Oh the mothers of heroes! Sources of raging rivers!
Ravines into which, from the high cliff of the heart,
weeping, you've already cast your girlhood,
to exist from now on for the sons!
For whenever the hero was interrupted by love,
he would storm free, propelled forward
by every heartbeat that claimed him --
until, already turning to go, he'd stand
at the end of the smiles, a stranger.