the first sky is inside you, friend

 

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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.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Gabriel Caffrey version

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Ah, not to be cut off,
not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.

The inner -- what is it?
if not the intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Stephen Mitchell version

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Look at the birds. Even flying
is born

out of nothing. The first sky
is inside you, Friend, open

at either end of day.
The work of wings
was always freedom, fastening
one heart to every falling thing.


—Li-Young Lee
Book of My Nights, One Heart

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