Playgrounds

Death is great.
We are in his keep
Laughing and whole.
When we feel deep
In life, he dares weep
Deep in our soul

Rilke always has something to say about topics that are usually left unsaid. Death is one of those topics. We tend to avoid it until it presents itself in our reality in one form or another. Rilke didn’t feel that way. He faced his demons, especially death by writing about how he perceived it. He spend days and nights watching and listening to depressed and desolate souls that were anxiously knocking on the door of death and waiting for a reply.

In his work Coda,translated by Walter Arndt, we can sense his perceptions. Just like death, the poem comes from nowhere and awakens another aspect of our reality. As Rilke points out, death is very much alive. We give it life in the hallways of our beliefs.

The playground for death is called life.Death laughs on the playground. We want to sense and feel death physically using our thoughts and emotions. We want to taste loss in order to remember nothing is lost. We want to experience trauma, so we can know the self in its diversity. We want to accept the self as a whole, within another whole in the act of death.