Rilke's First Duino Elegy, Rewritten For Roxana Dyer Poem by Rob Dyer

The First Duino Elegy of Rilke
Rewritten for Roxana Dyer


Who, if I screamed,
from the ranks of the angels would hear me then?
Even imagine one took me suddenly in his arms:
who I am would be lost in his greater Being.
So beauty was nothing
but the beginning of nightmare, from which we will scarcely awake;
we marvel at beauty, because in the end it has never bothered
to destroy us. Every angel message first brings us terror.

So with strong restraint I choke back the temptation
of agonized sobbing. Oh who then to turn to
in need? Not angels, not people,
and the animals hearing my pulse knew already
that I was not really settled
in this world we have named without knowledge.

Perhaps there waits for me a pohutukawa on a hillside,
that I can look at over and over; a country road from yesterday;
the unreasoning certainty of a childhood habit
that pleased me and stayed without interruption
in foreign lands.

Oh and the night, the night, when the wind screams from nowhere,
scratching us in the face...
For whom does She not wait, the desired and gently deceiving,
who stands disturbing before the solitary heart?
Is She kinder to the lovers in bed?
Oh they embrace, but only to hide all they have lost.
Still don't you see?
Throw open your arms that the emptiness
may pass out again into the spaces that we breathe.
Perhaps the air will seem further away to the birds
as they fly along paths the genes remember.

Oh yeah? you mean Spring came only for you;
the stars waited till you noticed them;
a wave rose in the past for you; a violin,
as you walked past a window, rang out for you.
That was all because of you?
But were you strong enough to bear it?
Weren't you always still driven crazy
by waiting, as if every moment would bring you news
of her loss? (Where will you hide her grey eyes,
as the huge new thought strangers go in and out
of your mind, and often stay the night?)

You feel longing, so sing more songs of the lovers
whose famous emotions are not yet immortal enough.
Each of the abandoned heroines you almost envied,
for you thought them so much more loving
than those whose call was answered.

Begin ever anew to praise the mark beyond reach.
Think: the hero lives on, even his end
was only for him a new page of his story,
his latest reincarnation.
But Nature when she's done
takes back the beloved, as if
there was no more strength to renew her.

Did we sing enough the sad sonnets
of Gaspara Stampa, intensifying lost love?
Every girl says, “If only I could love like her! ”
Shouldn’t her old sufferings have borne more fruit?
Is it not time we release lover from loved one,
shaken, to move on, as the arrow that feels the string
released gathers to fly and is more than it was.

Voices, voices! Listen, my heart, as else only
holy men listened, that vast good news lift them
from earth; but they kneeled, inhuman,
on and on, and paid no attention.
That’s how they listened. You cannot bear
the burden of God’s voice - far from it.
Just listen to the soft lament,
the uninterrupted report that rises in silence.
It rustles now towards you in the lilt of her song.
Wherever you stepped inside to pray,
did it not quietly tell you she’s gone?
The plaques on the walls, did they not claim
your attention? What did they ask? That gently
you should untie the knot of injustice, no longer
hamper the flowing motion of those departed.

I guess it is strange no longer to live on this earth,
no longer to need habits just learned,
not to grant roses and other meaningful things
the interpretation of man’s tomorrow,
no longer to be that which one used to
in tirelessly anxious hands, even to get rid
of one’s own name, like a broken toy.
Strange no longer to wish wishes,
strange, to see all that moved or was moved
flutter free in space.

Being dead is a nuisance,
full of errands just to track down
some small eternity.
Being alive is to make mistakes,
distinctions too bold.
Angels, they say, often can’t tell which
they visit, dead or alive.