Abriel Louise Young: Calling on Friends Across the Veil to Help Us Change History

I remember reading Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” first on an airplane to Germany as an 18-year-old. I was going to participate in an environmental work-camp program for international teenagers who wanted to restore an island where the water was blood-red from lack of oxygen. Dead algae as long as a Kraken washed up on the shore. I loved the poem, dog-eared it, memorized it.*

It was the late nineties, the days when you could get an international plane ticket for $50 in exchange for giving up your luggage space to an unnamed party via an air courier service. This is exactly what we are now warned against doing, over a loudspeaker, every 15 minutes in an airport. Then, pre-9/11, it was a cute security loophole that let trusting budget travelers fling themselves across the globe with just a carry-on. I never knew who used my luggage space or what they sent. It was all arranged by shady air courier travel companies who sent the paper ticket by Federal Express, minus baggage stubs. O, blissful ignorance.

“Silent friend of many distances, feel / how your breath enlarges all of space.” Is there a more beautiful way to address someone who has died? I wanted very much, then, to listen to messages from the dead. I listened to Dead Can Dance nonstop, volunteered as a vigil-sitter at the AIDS hospice.

I planned to go from the work-camp on the island of Rugen to the former German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau. I left the work-camp early; it was not as promised. Instead of doing ecological cleanup, we were to repaint the large house belonging to the director of the center, and then to paint his long picket fence. I left one night and hitchhiked to a nunnery that served as a youth hostel for women, then to Auschwitz.

When I got there, I remember noting in my journal the shock of contemporary graffiti (Jurgen + Rosa 1994, etc.) on the wooden posts of the barracks. Was it ignorance, irrepressible life, or intentional disrespect? I remember the huge swaths of waving prairie grass and wildflowers that blanketed the area and the vines that wanted to come in through chinks in the logs. It seemed like nature was trying to reabsorb the place. That was a relief.

I wonder what the inhabitants of those barracks would think if they were able to see what is happening in the Holy Land today. What would they make of the starvation, thirst, bombardment, of a helpless population, purportedly in their name? What grief would descend if they could see history repeat in a sickening backwards rhyme?

“What feeds upon your face / grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered. / Move through transformation, out and in.”

I hope that if those souls are aware, if they are able to move energies on Earth, they will assist to end the genocides happening now—they will “be the power / that rounds your senses in their magic ring, / the sense of their mysterious encounter.” I hope that their access to divine communications will bring those who destroy others to their senses, will stop the hands on the buttons that drop the bombs.

“What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? / If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.” I have lost much in this life, as I’m sure you have. But the deepest loss I’ve suffered has not been personal. It’s been seeing, over the last year, the vivid horror of what people are capable of doing to others by watching the Israeli occupation’s assault on the people and land of Palestine. It’s been falling in love with preteens on video showing how they cook with scant supplies in a refugee camp, reciting their poetry, beaming smiles to strangers; waking to learn they’ve been murdered overnight with 200 other mothers and children by a bunker bomb dropped on cotton tents. 

What is the deepest loss that you have suffered? Have you succeeded in changing yourself to wine? If so, please report back.

I pray for mercy, for life, for love and justice, for a change of power to arrive. “To the flashing water say: I am.”

*

SONNET TO ORPHEUS, II 29

by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell

Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

​And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

~~~

Author’s note: I support a family in Gaza and raise funds for them at bit.ly/help-amer. The money has had an immediate survival impact: the ability to buy a tent, rent a place for the tent, move it again and again, buy a little food (at astounding prices), medicine, clothing, cooking gas. I am hoping to raise another $10,000 before the year is done so they may have a warmer winter and buy food when possible. I’d be happy to share more about the family with anyone who’s interested in helping support their survival. bit.ly/help-amer

~~~

Abriel Louise Young is a poet, writing coach & human rights advocate.

~~~

Essay copyright 2024 Abriel Louise Young

Poem from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke: Bilingual Edition (English and German Edition), translated by Stephen Mitchell, Vintage, 1989. Included in Vox Populi for noncommercial educational uses only.