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The Apple Orchard by poet Rainer Maria Rilke
This poem from Rainer Maria Rilke struck me this morning as particularly apt for this Lenten season and to the dawn of spring. It reminds me of how during Lent we take a kind of spiritual inventory … perhaps “to find releases and seek new hopes”. As we continue our Lenten journey, in what ways are you silently growing … and bearing fruit?
The Apple Orchard
Come let us watch the sun go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard’s green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season’s hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.~ Rainer Maria Rilke from Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Poems, translated from German by Albert Ernest Flemming)
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