thank you, emily lewis.

one reason (among MANY) i love emily lewis is because she likes a lot of the same things i do. consider this poem:

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life, and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth—
it's she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

where the one guest is you.
In the softness of evening
it's you she receives.

You are the partner of her loneliness,
the unspeaking center of her monologues.
With each disclosure you encompass more
and she stretches beyond what limits her,
to hold you.

Rainer Maria Rilke,The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

LOVE it. thanks em.

The Man Watching

The Man Watching

Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after

so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes

that a storm is coming,

and I hear the far-off fields say things

I can't bear without a friend,

I can't love without a sister

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on

across the woods and across time,

and the world looks as if it had no age:

the landscape like a line in the psalm book,

is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!

What fights us is so great!

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need 

names.

When we win it's with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to be bent by us.

I mean the Angel who appeared

to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:

when the wrestler's sinews

grew long like metal strings,

he felt them under his fingers

like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel

(who often simply declined the fight)

went away proud and strengthened

and great from that harsh hand,

that kneaded him as if to change his shape.

Winning does not tempt that man.

This is how he grows: by being defeated,

decisively,

by constantly greater beings.

_______________________________

I think I like this poem so much because it is so encouraging.  I like the image that we are being shaped, being kneaded by this harsh hand to change our shape.  This is how we grow--we are constantly put in our place, decisively.

i sit and look out.

I Sit and Look Out
Walt Whitman

I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame;

I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done;

I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate;

I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer of young women;

I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid--I see these sights on the earth;

I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny--I see martyrs and prisoners;

I observe a famine at sea--I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;

I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;

All these--All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon,

See, hear, and am silent.