Rainer Maria Rilke: Untitled ["I Love the Dark Hours of My Being"]

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

Untitled ["I Love the Dark Hours of My Being"] by Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. © Riverhead, 1997.

Photography credit: "Infrared Cherry Tree Gravestone," infrared image by Deborah Sandidge.