№ 11. Rilke at the Delta Quadrant

I stumbled upon this poem while, again, conducting a space exploration deep in the Delta Quadrant.

Thankfully, I skipped the Borg corridor. I didn’t want to be assimilated and forced another round of Talaxian beer and who knows what other nano ales.

In Celebration of Me (1909)

Rainer Maria Rilke translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

I am so afraid of people's words.

They describe so distinctly everything:

And this they call dog and that they call house,

here the start and there the end.

I worry about their mockery with words,

they know everything, what will be, what was;

no mountain is still miraculous;

and their house and yard lead right up to God.

I want to warn and object: Let the things be!

I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.

But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.

That's how you kill.

Bento Box:

"René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographicalThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland."