From ‘The Grown-Up’ by Rainer Maria Rilke
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace as trees stand,
growing straight up, imageless yet wholly image…
As she endured it all: bore up under
the flying, the fleeting, the distant,
the inconceivably vast, the still to learn…
Till in the midst of play,
transfiguring and preparing for the future,
the first white veil descended, gliding softly over her opened face,
almost opaque there, never to be lifted off again,
and somehow giving to all her questions just one answer:
In you, who were a child once – in you.
