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Unending one, you’ve shown yourself to me.
I love you as I would love a son
who long since went from me,
because his fate called him
to a high place
where he could see out
over all things.
I have stayed home like an old man
who no longer understands his son
and knows little of the new things
that concern him now.
I tremble sometimes for your happiness,
that ventures abroad on so many ships.
I wish sometimes that you were back inside me,
in this darkness that grew you.
And when I get confused by time,
I fear you no longer exist --
though I know, the Evangelist
keeps writing about your eternity.
I am the father; but the son is more.
He is all the father was, and what the father was not
grows great in him. He is the future
and the return. He is the womb, he is the sea . . . .
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
To you my prayers are no blasphemy:
the old books tell me I am related to you
in a thousand ways.
I want to love you.
Does anyone love a father? Doesn’t one turn away
as you turned from me, your face hardened,
wanting to escape these empty, helpless hands?
Doesn’t one leave a father’s worn-out words
to old books that are seldom read?
Is his heart not a watershed
from which one flows away,
toward passion and suffering?
Isn’t the father always that which was?
Used-up years with their odd ways of thinking,
outmoded gestures, old-fashioned dress,
pale hands and ashen hair.
And while in his time he may have been a hero,
he is a leaf that, when we grow, falls away.
-- Rilke
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