Artificial Light by Marion and Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke

Entrance

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let go. . . .

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

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"Every exit is an entrance somewhere else." ~Tom Stoppard

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Artificial Light
By Marion

The dawn creeps into my window,
a willing thief of the night;
I wrap my arms around myself
and tremble at the onslaught of light.

Is ink to paper the real thing
or merely an illusion?
Is the cursor on the computer screen
reality or a wild delusion?

Cloudy, dark, rainy day
driving home one afternoon
bright lights in my rearview mirror
shone like the sun at noon.

Which is reality,
the headlights or the sun?
Does it really matter in the end
when a life has finally begun?

Moonlight, sunlight,
flowers in the rain,
their heads bowed as if in prayer
drooped, as if in pain. . .

Beseeching the gods of morning
to help them raise their heads. . .
They only live one single day
by afternoon, they’re dead.

The question is how to live
your one solitary life.
By the sunlight or the shadows
or by artificial light.

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