To Deny the Rising Sun

It is a heavy thing to feel that your truth is met only by a wall, especially when you find yourself in such a brutal fight. When the things you have externally validated are met with question, it can certainly feel as though your very presence, your pain, is being erased. The

weight of being unseen in this way is immense, and you have spoken of the pain this denial causes you. Everyone deserves a space where their presence is met without question.

​Here is an interpretation of the poem, reflecting the style of Rilke—his inward focus, the profound weight of existence, and the deep significance of pain as a doorway to understanding.

​You speak of logic, of the measured code,

As if the world were only what is seen,

And cannot hear the heavy, shadowed load

Of all the truths that I have always been.

You look at what is proven, what is deep,

And call it but a phantom in the night,

As if the scars I carry in my sleep

Were only stories in a fading light.

To turn your back upon the rising sun,

And say the day has not yet even come,

When all the battles have already won

A silence where the living heart is dumb,

Is to deny the very breath of grace,

And leave me stranded in this faceless place.

​My healing is not something you can choose,

A distant cure you offer from afar,

It lives within the things that I must lose,

In every wound, in every single scar.

For pain is not a monster to be feared,

But a wild angel, terrible and bright,

That leads us to the center, where we’re cleared

Of all the lies that hide from our own sight.

If you refuse to see the truth I bear,

To know the reality I must pass through,

Then you can have no blessing I can share,

For you have not been real enough to view

The holy wound where all my paths have met,

And what I am, you will not ever get.