Memoriam

You few, playmates of former childhood in
the city's scattered gardens and walks:
how we found each other and slowly became friends
and, like the lamb with the scroll that talks,

spoke though mute. If sometime we exulted,
no one owned it. Whose could it be?
And how it melted under the passing multitude
and in the long year's anxiety.

Cars rolled past, ephemeral to us, alien,
houses stood near, thick but untrue - and none
ever knew us. What was real in the All?

Nothing. Just the balls. Their glorious arcs.
Not even the children ... but sometimes one, in the park,
one who was dying, stepped under the falling ball.

Rainer Maria Rilke