the choices we make

And in the silence of night
You will hear her wailing pierce the sky
There is no hope left in sight
You’ve become the devil in her eyes

for all the things i lost

The Ninth Duino Elegy
(excerpt)

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other greens, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) –: why then
must we be human – and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss,
Not out of curiosity, nor as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too….

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once and no more.
And we too, just once. Never again. But to have been
this once was real, even if only once:
earthly and real, it can never be undone.

- Rainer Maria Rilke -

mood: sad