RILKE'S DAY
Birth Dec. 4 1875

Rilke, ailing yet you wrote
back from your Swiss spa
in Val- Mont
to Marina Tsvetaeva
and Boris Pasternak,
not hesitation to acknowledge
in my estimation to be
(if we leave Goethe out)
the first international poet
yet your matured modernity
sweeps away verse
of any small formality
and all nationality
becomes a stateless dream
as you leap in a snow storm
into a global curiosity
from a poet's kaleidoscope
for a century seems to yearn
and wait
on what your nature grasps
robed with mystical words
from your melancholy silence
as a bird in the summit
of clouds in the sky
drops by a birches branch
in a new language of modernity
which like Cleopatra's
dramatic asp
electrifies your audience.