Flashback on Life and its Lessons: Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letter to a Young Poet:” A Tribute -5

City of Rome he is, as he write
Romanian art he narrates, thus!
Old Summerhouse, quiet and simple
near a large park, away from
din and bustle of city well-known!

As vastness of solitude grows on
don’t settle for sociable unknown!
Solitude, a vast solitude,
necessity of the soul!

To walk within and meet no one
for hours and hours…
Is an attainment for sure!

Solitary one was, as a child
when grown-ups walked around…
Involved and busy with matters
“so large and important!”
Clueless as a child, understanding
of which one had none!

And, in that solitariness when you realize
the activities of grown up being shabby,
vacation turning petrified
and no longer connected with life…

Then why not look at everything
the way a child would!
Everything around to be unfamiliar
from the depth of your own solitude
a work, status and vacation of its own!

Understanding nothing as a response
for defensiveness and scorn!
Since, not understanding at all
is a “way of being alone.”
Separating yourself from
with which you can’t connect!

Think of the world that one carry inside
calling the thought process, whatever one wants!
A reminiscence of childhood memory
or a yearning of one’s own future
being aware of whatever arises within then!

All that happens in one’s inner realms
deserves complete love that one has!
Work at loving oneself…
explaining nothing and wasting time
on one who call it “attitude,” thus!

All profession the master suggest are demanding
filled with hostility towards the individual.
Saturated with hatred,
mute and sullen in an insipid duty!

Truest kinds of life consist of
conventions, prejudices and false ideas!
But, a solitary individual
is placed under the deepest law of the “Things!”

One who, “walks out into the rising dawn,”
or “looks out into the event filled evening…”
and when one feels of all the happening around...
Situation all that have arisen,
drop from him, like a dead man!

Everywhere it is the same
but that should not be the cause for anxiety or sadness
If there is something, you feel you cannot share
Stick to Things: Night, the Wind:
that moves through the trees and across many lands…
For everything in the world of Things
is still filled with happening!

One can still be sad and happy as a child
And, when you think of it, you re-live it again!
If the childhood frighten and torments one
because of its simplicity and silence!
Unable to believe in God, who appears everywhere
Ask then oneself, has the one really lost God
for the possession of him is none!

What if he didn’t exist at all
Neither in childhood, nor when you are grown up
Not as Christ, neither as Muhammad
but, someone who would be approaching soon!

One who approaches “from all eternity,”
the ultimate fruit of a tree,
whose leaves we are…
One, who is not be thought in history
but happening in cycle repeating itself
as a new beginning!