Home from the soaring

In my first trip to Ireland two years ago, I brought Rainer Maria Rilke’s Book of Hours with me to read on the plane. I find Rilke a surprisingly translatable poet, and the poems set an inquiringly meditative tone for a trip that proved to be every bit as much a pilgrimage as it was an intensive Latin boot camp.

I’m headed to Ireland again today on a graduation trip with my sister, enjoying some of my old haunts and exploring new ones before I move to the Midwest and she to east Asia. We booked the tickets six months ago before we knew about either excursion, and thus we booked a longer vacation than we would have had we been aware of the intensity of this summer. I have been tricked into enjoying a long vacation, as it turns out; I have been tricked into receiving some grace.

Anyway, as I head off for nearly five weeks in Ireland, I wish I had my copy of Rilke’s Book of Hours to read again as I return (I gave my copy to my friend Paul as a celebation present last year). But as I posted one of the poems in this blog two years ago, I can at least use that one as my sending off. The words are appropriate differently than they were then.

I come home from the soaring
in which I lost myself.
I was song, and the
refrain which is God
is still roaring in my ears.

Now I am still
and plain:
no more words.

To the others I was like a wind:
I made them shake.
I’d gone very far, as far as the angels,
and high, where light things into nothing.

But deep in the darkness is God…