All of you undisturbed cities,
haven’t you ever longed for the enemy?
I’d like to see you besieged by him
for ten endless and ground-shaking years.
Until you were desperate and mad with suffering;
finally in hunger you would feel his weight.
He lies outside the walls like a countryside.
And he knows very well how to endure
longer than the ones he comes to visit.
Climb up on your roofs and look out:
his camp is there, and his morale doesn’t falter,
and his numbers do not decrease; he will not grow weaker,
and he sends no one into the city to threaten
or promise, and no one to negotiate.
He is the one who breaks down the walls,
and when he works, he works in silence.
April is National Poetry Month and every day the peaceCENTER will be posting a poem about walls, fences, edges, borders. . . you get the idea. Walls that separate us, protect us, define us, challenge us . . . we collected these poems for our Walls Symposium in 2009.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 – 1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian (Czech) poet and novelist, who wrote in both verse and highly lyrical prose. This translation translated is by Robert Bly.
