May 15, 2011

Offering

Bathers, by Paul Cézanne

...Our loving is not, like the flowers', the offering
of a single year. When we love, there rises in us
a sap from time immemorial. Oh my dear girl,
it is this: that we loved, in each other, not an individual
or one coming toward us, but brimming multitudes;
not a single child but the fathers
fallen to the depths of us like crumbled mountains,
and the dry riverbeds of ancestral mothers;
the whole soundless landscape
under the clear or clouded sky of fate:
all this, my dear, came before you.

From the Third Duino Elegy

4 comments:

  1. Ancestry.com should have this one on its website...

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  2. Not a poem, this "Elegy," but Poetry, the very elegiac source of the heart of god; not loving, our temporal stay against oblivion, but Love itself, as if there was a heart beyond the heart to which the Poet must make his way, find her peace, making an enduring home there in "the whole soundless landscape/under the clear or clouded sky of fate." Rather audacious task. Ask Orpheus after Eurydice. - Brendan

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  3. "the line of me, meets the line of you" i remember hearing that spoken by an australian aborigine. sthat's where it begins. then there is the love that connects all things. steven

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  4. this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read-ever felt
    yes, we bring love with us
    ancient needing refreshing
    updating
    we share the loves of our past to spawn the love of tomorrow
    and the circle goes on
    never knowing an end-or beginning
    or solution
    love, as only it can be
    heartache and all
    just beautiful

    ReplyDelete

"Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night."

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Go ahead, bloom recklessly!