POEM IN YOUR POCKET

April is National Poetry Month and April 14 is Poem in Your Pocket Day this year.

SONNET TO ORPHEUS,
PART TWO, XII
by Rainer Marie Rilke

Want the change.  Be inspired by the flame
Where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive.  And Daphne, becoming a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.