Catch What You’ve Thrown Yourself

by Rainer Maria Rilke

As long as you catch what you've thrown yourself, it's all 
just clever agility and venial gain;
but when you suddenly come to catch a ball
an eternal playmate has thrown
at you, at your center, has exactly set
in mastered motion, in an arc
out of God's great bridge-building -
then that you catch is real power:
not yours, the world's. And when you even
have the strength to throw it back,
no, better yet: have forgotten courage and strength
and thrown it back already...(the way the year
throws birds, the flocks of migrating birds
hurled over the ocean from an old to a new
warmth - ) then, that gamble, is the first moment
you too can be said to play. You
unburden yourself of the throw no longer; you burden
yourself with the throw no longer. Out of your hands steps
the meteor and it races into its skies...

Peace, dwight

catching for all
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2 thoughts on “catching for all

  • July 11, 2005 at 5:02 PM
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    rilke – the man!
    I like the new look Dwight. I’ll be passing through Seattle in a few weeks time – it might be good to meet for a coffee if possible? Hope the family are good.

  • March 7, 2006 at 8:34 PM
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    thank you for posting this – just started reading rilke – letters to a young poet. although i am a painter not a poet his advice applies to my own work. do you know in which of rilke’s works exactly this poem appears? thanks.

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