Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Sonnets to Orpheus II, 7
Flowers, kinfolk at last to arranging hands,
(hands of young women, long ago and now), you
who lay on the garden table, often from rim to
rim, weary and mildly wounded
awaiting the water that would revive you
from death, already begun---, and now
lifted again between the streaming poles
of feeling fingers, that have even more power
to do good than you guessed, weightless ones,
when you came to in the jug, cooling slowly
and giving off the warmth of young women
like confessions, like thick, fatiguing sins
the act of plucking brought on, relating you again
to those who ally themselves with your blooming.