Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
Only in Our Doing
Only in our doing can we grasp you.
Only with our hands can we illumine you.
The mind is but a visitor:
it thinks us out of the world.
Each mind fabricates itself.
We sense its limits, or we have made them.
And just when we would flee them, you come
and make of yourself an offering.
I don’t want to think a place for you.
Speak to me from everywhere.
Your Gospel can be comprehended
without looking for its source.
When I go toward you
It is with my whole life.
Translated from German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an Austrian poet who from a very early age knew that his life was meant for literature, poetry, and writing. A frequent theme of Rilke’s poetry, Annemarie Kidder remarks, "is the human heart's insatiable longing for the transcendent, the divine," which expressed itself in religious proclivities that were decidedly unorthodox. This poem can be found Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead, 2005), 51.
Selected by Amy Frykholm: amy@journeywithjesus.net
