For Tony,
Excerpts from the First Elegy, Rainer Maria Rilke
‘Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
not to see roses and other promising things
in terms of a human future; no longer to be
what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave
even one's own first name behind, forgetting it
as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one's desires. Strange
to see meanings that clung together once,
floating away in every direction.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.’
Trs. by Stephen Mitchell
Beverley Jane
30th January 2022