from R M Rilke’s French poetry

This is an excerpt from the Verges/Orchards sequence of French poems, written in the last four to five years of his life. from poem 42 Tonight there was something in the air that makes us bow our heads; we want to pray for prisoners for whom life stops. And we think of life stopped…. Of life no longer moving towards death and of where the future’s absent; where one must be uselessly strong and sad, endlessly. …………………………………………………………………. translated from the French, by A Poulin, JR The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, published by Graywolf Press, 1979