Poem of the Week: 'At the Brink of Night' by Rainer Maria Rilke

My room and this distance, awake upon the darkening land, are one. I am a string stretched across deep surging resonance. Things are violin bodies full of murmuring darkness, where women's weeping dreams, where the rancor of whole generations stirs in its sleep . . . I should release my silver vibrations: then everything below me will live, and whatever strays into things

will seek the light that falls without end from my dancing tone into the old abysses around which heaven swells through narrow imploring rifts.