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“Loneliness” by Rainer Maria Rilke 🇦🇹 (4 Dec 1875 – 29 Dec 1926)
Translated from the German by Robert Bly
Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.
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It rains down on us in those twittering
hours when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
dissapointed and depressed, roll over;
and when two people who despise eachother
have to sleep together in one bed—
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that is when loneliness receives the rivers …