Page:Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918).djvu/81

 LAMENT

Oh! All things are long passed away and far.

A light is shining but the distant star

From which it still comes to me has been dead

A thousand years In the dim phantom boat

That glided past some ghastly thing was said.

A clock just struck within some house remote.

Which house?—I long to still my beating heart.

Beneath the sky's vast dome I long to pray

Of all the stars there must be far away

A single star which still exists apart.

And I believe that I should know the one

Which has alone endured and which alone

Like a white City that all space commands

At the ray's end in the high heaven stands.

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