Interior Portrait!

Interior Portrait

You don't survive in me
because of memories;
nor are you mine because
of a lovely longing's strength.

What does make you present
is the ardent detour
that a slow tenderness
traces in my blood.

I do not need
to see you appear;
being born sufficed for me
to lose you a little less.

A swan swims on the water
surrounded by itself
like a gliding picture;
thus at certain moments
a being that we love
is utter space in motion.

Like this swimming swan,
doubled, it comes closer
on our troubled soul...
which to this being adds
the rippling image
of happiness and doubt

All my goodbyes are said. Many separations
slowly shaped me since my infancy.
But I come back again and I begin again;
this fresh return releases my attention.

What's left for me is to replenish it,
and my joy, forever unrepentant
for having loved the things resembling
these absences that make us act.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875. He is known as one of Europe's most prolific writers. In the German-speaking world, Rilke is considered the greatest poet of the twentieth century.

We keep wanting to sense and feel our own interior portrait. We want to emotionally touch our inner self; the self that is not bound by time and space. We want to swim in the deep waters of our own awareness, and enjoy every drop of it. We want to embrace the physical self with the invisible arms of our essence,and we do, but we forget we do.

Our imagination and emotions create our physical reality, but the inner self creates our interior portrait. Our interior portrait is constantly changing as we move through time. We want to experience and love each one of our portraits. We may believe we are one portrait, but we are a gallery of portraits, and they all hang in splendid awareness of our consciousness.