reality

Sonnets To Orpheus II, 8

Wenige ihr, der einstigen Kindheit Gespielen
in den zerstreuten Gärten der Stadt:
wie wir uns fanden und uns zögernd gefielen
und, wie das Lamm mit dem redenden Blatt,

sprachen als schweigende. Wenn wir uns einmal freuten,
keinem gehörte es. Wessen wars?
Und wie zergings unter allen den gehenden Leuten
und im Bangen des Langen Jahrs.

Wagen umrollten uns fremd, vorübergezogen,
Häuser umstanden uns stark, aber unwahr,- und keines
kannte uns je. Was war wirklich im All?

Nichts. Nur die Bälle. Ihre herrlichen Bogen.
Auch nicht die Kinder ... Aber manchmal trat eines,
ach ein vergehendes, unter den fallenden Ball.

In memoriam Egon von Rilke

You few, playmates of former childhood in
the city's scattered gardens and walks:
how we found each other and slowly became friends
and, like the lamb with the scroll that talks,

spoke though mute. If sometime we exulted,
no one owned it. Whose could it be?
And how it crumbled among the hustling multitude
and in the long year's anxiety.

Cars rolled past, ephemeral to us, alien,
houses stood near, sturdy but untrue - and none
ever knew us. What was real in the All?

Nothing. Just the balls. Their glorious arcs.
Not even the children ... but sometimes one, in the park,
one passing by, stepped under the falling ball.

In memoriam Egon von Rilke

Translation notes:

Line 4: “das Lamm mit dem redenden Blatt”. “Blatt” can mean leaf, sheet, page, or anything thin and flat. But in this case the line seems to be a reference to Revelations 5, where a lamb with 7 horns and 7 eyes takes “a scroll with writing on both sides and sealed with seven seals” and a hundred million angels praise its worthiness.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Philip K. Dick