A Year with Rilke: We Stand in Your Garden

A Year with Rilke: We Stand in Your Garden
Excerpt:
Lord, we are more wretched than the animals
who do their deaths once and for all,
for we are never finished with our not dying.

Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

We stand in your garden year after year.
We are trees for yielding a sweet death.
But fearful, we wither before the harvest.
The Book of Hours III; 8