you are the deep innerness of all things

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The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
Its water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beneath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.


—Wisława Szymborska
View With a Grain of Sand
Stanisław Barańczak and Clare Cavanagh version

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You are the deep innerness of all things,
the last word that can never be spoken.

To each of us you reveal yourself differently:
to the ship as coastline, to the shore as a ship.


—Rainer Maria Rilke
Anita Barrows version

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