"be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses"

Call on friends across the veil to accompany us and to change history.

Japanese crows, illustration from Seitei Kacho Gafu (1890–1891) by Wantanabe Seitei, a prominent Kacho-ga artist

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SONNET TO ORPHEUS, II 29

by Rainer Maria Rilke
                                                    [translated by Stephen Mitchell]

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

​And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke: Bilingual Edition (English and German Edition), translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage, 1989.

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Reflection on the Poem

I remember reading Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus II 29” first on an airplane to Germany as an 18-year old. I was going to participate in an environmental work-camp program for international teenagers who wanted to restore an island where the water was blood-red from lack of oxygen. Dead algae as long as a Kraken washed up on the shore. I loved this poem, dog-eared it, memorized it.

It was the nineties, the days when you could get an international plane ticket for $50 in exchange for giving up your luggage space to an unnamed party via an air courier service. This is exactly what we are now warned against doing, over a loudspeaker, every 15 minutes in an airport. Then, pre-9/11, it was a cute security loophole that let trusting budget travelers fling themselves across the globe with just a carry-on. I never knew who used my luggage space or what they sent. It was all arranged by shady air courier travel companies who sent the paper ticket by Federal Express, minus baggage stubs—blissful ignorance.

“Silent friend of many distances, feel / how your breath enlarges all of space.” Is there a more beautiful way to address someone who has died? I wanted very much, then, to listen to messages from the dead. I listened to Dead Can Dance nonstop, volunteered as a vigil-sitter at the AIDS hospice.

I planned to go from the work-camp on the island of Rugen to the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. I left the work-camp early; it was not as promised. Instead of doing ecological cleanup, we were to repaint the large house belonging to the director of the center, and then to paint his long picket fence. I left one night and hitchhiked to a nunnery that served as a hostel for women, then to Auschwitz.

When I got there, I remember noting in my journal the shock of contemporary graffiti (Jurgen + Rosa 1994, etc.) on the wooden posts of the barracks. Was it ignorance, irrepressible life, or intentional disrespect? I remember also the huge swaths of waving prairie grass and wildflowers that blanketed the area and the vines that wanted to come in through the chinks in the logs. It seemed like nature was trying to reabsorb the place. That was a relief.

I wonder what the inhabitants of those barracks would think if they were able to see what is happening in the Holy Land today. What would they make of the starvation, thirst, bombardment, entrapment of a helpless population of millions, purportedly in their name? What grief would descend if they could see history repeat, but in a sickening backwards rhyme?

“What feeds upon your face / grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. / Move through transformation, out and in.”

I hope that if those souls are aware, if they are able to move energies on Earth, they will assist to end the genocides happening now—to “be the power / that rounds your senses in their magic ring, / the sense of their mysterious encounter.” I hope that their sense of the divine will bring those who destroy others to their senses, will stop the hands on the buttons that drop the bombs.

“What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? / If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.” I have lost much in this life, as I’m sure you have. But the deepest lostness I’ve suffered has not been personal. It’s been seeing, over the last year, the vivid horror of what people are capable of doing to others. It’s been falling in love with young people on video showing how they cook in a refugee camp, reciting their poetry, beaming smiles to strangers, only to learn that they’ve been murdered overnight with 100 other mothers and children by a 2000-lb bunker bomb dropped on polyester tents. And then again the next night, for 362 days.

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? Have you succeeded in changing yourself to wine? If so, please report back.

I pray for mercy, for life, for love and justice, for a change of power to arrive. “To the flashing water say: I am.”