Poetry Thursday - Blue

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat

held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable
it is alternately stone in you and star.

Rainer Maria Rilke (Evening)

Rilke's perfect song to the trees and the deepening blue skies of evening is a poem I carry with me everywhere I go although it is a short composition, and there is no need to commit it to paper and carry it about in my billfold. I seldom observe a nightfall (particularly in autumn) or watch the moon and stars come up without thinking of this poem and and reciting it to myself. Everything this man has ever written is perfection.