Sonnet Inspired By The Last Words Of Rilke's 8th Elegy Poem by Anthony Weir

Seeming to live
and always taking leave and re-attaching,
re-inventing love and hate and obligation
we are shadow-beings, abusing reason,
talking of 'soul' and always beyond all consolation.

We talk of beauty, but what we mean
is sad adornment of the squalor that we make.
We talk of 'progress': our progressive
enslavement to comfort - no give, all take

from whom and what we crush for comfort's sake;
progressive dependency on rapine
and diminishment of the whole world -
we demi-beings of too much light
and chatter, infantile, unillumined, arrogant and fake.