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“What birds plunge through is not the intimate space …” by Rainer Maria Rilke 🇦🇹 (4 Dec 187529 Dec 1926)
Translated from the German by Gabriel Caffrey
What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)
Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first time, shaped
in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.