750. The Man Watching, by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes,
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can't bear without a friend,
I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves by dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the angel, who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestler's sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel,
(who often simply declined the fight),
went away proud and strenghtened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

(trans Robert Bly)

Source: News of the Universe, edited by Robert Bly
 

762. Written in Dejection near Rome, by Robert Bly

What if these long races go on repeating themselves
century after century, living in houses painted light colors
on the beach,
black spiders,
having turned pale and fat,
men walking thoughtfully with their families,
vibrations
of exhausted violin-bodies,
horrible eternities of sea pines!
Some men cannot help but feel it,
they will abandon their homes
to live on rafts tied together on the ocean;
those on shore will go inside tree trunks,
surrounded by bankers whose fingers have grown long and slender,
piercing through rotten bark for their food.

Source: The Light Around the Body, by Robert Bly

834. Poem, by Kabir

Why should we two ever want to part?

Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,
we live as the great one and little one.

As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and little one.

This love between us goes back to the first humans;
it cannot be annihilated.

Here is Kabir's idea: as the river gives itself into the ocean,
what is inside me moves inside you.

(trans Robert Bly)

Source: Kabir: Ecstatic Poems

863. March Evening, by Harry Martinson

Winterspring, nightfall, thawing.
Boys have lit a candle in a snowball house.
For the man in the evening train that rattles past,
it is a red memory surrounded by gray time,
calling, calling, out of stark woods just waking up.
And the man who was traveling never got home,
his life stayed behind, held by that lantern and that hour.

(trans Robert Bly)

Source: The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations

890. Late May, by Tomas Transtromer

Apple trees and cherry trees in flower help the town to float
in the soft smudgy May night, white left-vests, thoughts go far away.
Stubborn grass and weeds beat their wings.
The mailbox shines calmly: what is written cannot be taken back.

A mild cooling wind goes through your shirt, feeling for the heart.
Apple trees and cherry trees laugh soundlessly at Solomon.
They blossom in my tunnel. And I need them
not to forget, but to remember.

(trans Robert Bly)

Source: Selected Poems, 1954-1986

996. Allegro, by Tomas Transtromer

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

(trans. Robert Bly)

Source: Selected Poems, 1954-1986