And do you know that you’re actually going to make more of a difference by focusing on politics than on the culture you’re passionate about? You don’t know what you might help make happen. Our world is full of the result of unintended as well as intended consequences.
—Yo-Yo Ma, “Yo-Yo Ma and the Meaning of Life” in The New York Times Magazine, Nov. 20, 2020
When Rilke travelled through Russia
and studied Saint Francis
and fell in love with the married Salomé
and wrote poems for The Book of Hours,
he could not have known
that over a century later
a woman on another continent
would find herself wrestled by darkness
and find in his poems encouragement
to lean even deeper into darkness
until she could fall in love
with what she feared most.
He could not have known she would
tattoo his words into her memory
and scribe them into her blood
so whenever she walked or lay in the dark
she would have his words ever with her,
and they made her not only more brave
but more wildly alive than she’d been before.
And what if, as his parents had pushed,
Rilke had joined the military
and turned his back on poetry?
And what if he had not gotten himself expelled
from trade school so he could go on
to study literature and art?
What would have become of the woman
a hundred years later
had she not found his poem
and learned from him to love the dark?
Here’s a version of that poem that saved me, “You Darkness, That I Come From,” read by Meryl Streep.
