Imago Poem by Hendrik Rost
Imago
This has to do with the beauty
of staying at home on one's own for a few days:
Summer's approaching its deadlines,
and I watch an ordinary bird
keeping to the lilies like a humming bird.
It's late afternoon, a damp air lies
over this fragile neighbourhood,
and I myself am responsible for the shadows
I cast. In the light there gleams the single
wing of a dragonfly -
its former body still clinging
to the stalk above the water.
This is the house of former poems,
the house of imperilled new ones.
translated by Hans-Christian Oeser and Gabriel Rosenstock
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
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12/22/2025 3:02:35 AM # 1.0.0
What an amazing closing couplet! I knew I was being prepared for a startling insight, but when you delivered it I was - WOW! The beauties you observe in this poem show an intensity of vision, the very thing needed to keep complacency from dulling ordinary life. Rilke refers to what you are doing observing natural things closely as MISSION, (The line is DAS ALLES WAR AUFTRAG from the First Elegy.) The Rilke passage begins YES, SPRING NEEDED YOU, and I get an almost custodial relationship between you and the bird. the damp air, the shadows, the dragonfly - there is a deep rapport expressed here without any self-serving language. What's more, I can right now leave my apartment and have precisely this experience where I am. This is a luminous poem.