hibernal : prevernal :: now : soon

25

Listen: already you can hear the first hoes

working: the human rhythm again

in the taut stillness of the hard

pre-vernal earth. What’s fast approaching

seems not stale to you. What has come to you

so often seems coming now

as something new. Always poised for it,

you never seized it. It seized you.

In the light of dusk even the leaves

of wintered oaks appear a future brown.

Sometimes the winds exchange a sign.

The shrubs are black. But heaps of dung

lie scattered in the fields, a richer black.

Each passing hour grows younger.

-Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Edward Snow