Rereading Duino Elegies

A yet-unpublished poem by Prartho

We called it Dengue Fever

anytime we were struck down

with aches and the shivers and

no hunger for anything but

a small cup of ashram soup, and

I was lucky enough to have found

the English-language bookstore

on Mahatma Gandhi Road

where Walt Whitman and Rainer

Maria Rilke hung out in paperback,

so it was the poets who sat with me

in my bamboo hut, and ferried me

through fever dreams, taught me

to sing the song of myself, initiated

me into the terror of angels.

Forty years later I pour myself

again into the heart of the hermit

crying out from the Duino cliffs—

I am listening back to the poets

and their angels: Truth is beauty

and beauty is terrible, they sing.

We know this by now, don’t we?

Every angel is gorgeous & dreadful.

But we’ve learned to say yes to those

envoys of fever or fear or whatever

malady draws near. And we nod

to the wrinkly old homeopath who fiercely

proclaims: Don’t trust a body that never

falls ill. We need to sink back, every now

& then, back to the softness

of how we began.

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash