How I have felt that thing that's called 'to part',
and feel it still: a dark, invincible
cruel something by which what was joined so well
is once more shown, held out, and torn apart.

In what defenceless gaze at that I've stood,
which, as it, calling to me, let me go,
stayed there, as though it were all womanhood,
yet small and white and nothing more than, oh,

a waving, now already unrelated
to me, a slight, continuing wave, - scarce now
explainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough
some perching cuckoo's hastily vacated.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Parting

' See, we don’t love like flowers,
with only one season behind us;
when we love, a sap older than memory rises in our arms. O girl,
it's like this: inside us we have loved
not just some one to come, but a fermenting tribe ; not just one
child, but fathers, cradled inside us like ruins
of mountains, the dry riverbeds
of those who were mothers, yes, and all that
soundless landscape under its clouded
or clear destiny - girl, all this came before you.'


Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino elegies, the third elegy.