On the Edge of Night
My room and this vastness,
awake over the darkening land,-
are one. I am a string,
stretched tightly over wide
raging resonances.
Things are violin-bodies
full of murmuring darkness:
in it dreams the weeping of women,
in it the grudge of whole
generations stirs in its sleep …
I shall vibrate
like silver: then everything
beneath me will live,
and whatever wanders lost in things
will strive toward the light
that from my dancing tone-
around which the heavens pulse-
through thin, pining rifts
into the old
abysses endlessly
falls…
Rilke
