Poetry Says To This Stark World: I Will Yet Have Beauty

Sense Of Something Coming
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Robert Bly

I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full
of silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.

Starlight
by Ivy Dempsey

We cannot own it—no,
it possesses us. Those eery
points of light—distant
beyond imagining.

I look up at
the stars, waiting, waiting,
as if I've arrived too late
for my life—

yet the light I see
comes to me from starry fires
that burned long ago, from bodies
losing themselves in an ancient dance.

Now what the stars mean for me
is light that lives on, even if its root
in a creature be broken—this light, this
oldest rhythm. Reminding me.