By Rainer Maria Rilke
How I’ve come to sense this thing called departure.
How I still know: a dark unscathed
cruel something, holding up a delicate braid,
showing it to us again, only to tear it apart.
How defenseless I was, looking upon
that which, calling to me as it left me,
remained behind, as if it were all women
and yet small and white and not quite that:
A waving, already no longer meant for me,
followed by lightly echoing waves –, all
but inexplicable: a plum tree perhaps
out of which a cuckoo, hastily, flew away.
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