This blog page is called Expressions… for a reason.
My intention has been to post the expressive movements that come from my heart/mind/voice/body, be they written or not. This week I offer a song that I have just recorded and published to the web. I sing this for myself, for all those with whom I work, for all those who find such an immensity of feeling welling up in them at this time. These words have for a long time comforted me and many to whom I have read them. I have already written and recorded many songs based on Rilke’s poems, but this is the first Sonnet. Just before recording it, I finally realized what the poet was saying at the end of the poem, and how it takes the reader back to the beginning stanza… maybe you will hear it right away, but it has taken me years.
I will post the words here, along with the video…
Part One, Sonnet IV
You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.
Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.
Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.
The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.
from In Praise of Mortality–Selections from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, translated and edited by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Riverhead Books, 2005.