This silent commerce, when life is no longer willing
to endure one of our kind, when it seizes him in its grip.
avenges itself, kills. For the fact that its strength *can* kill
was palin to us all from its delicacy and restraint
and from the curious power that transforms us from living
beings
into survivors. Non being. Do you remember how often
a blind command would carry us through the icy
waiting room of new birth?... Us?--a body of eyes
under numberless lids, refusing? Carried the down-
thrown heart in our breast, the heart of a whole generation.

From "Elegy to Marina Tsvetayeva-Efron by Rilke, Mitchell trans.