Rainer Maria Rilke
by Leonid Pasternak
Greetings!
In September I put out a Poetry Challenge to any/all who might be interested
in submitting a poem for a project I called ‘Voices for the Voiceless’. About 20
of you responded with creative and diverse contributions, something for which
I’m deeply grateful. Unfortunately my computer has had a ‘crash’ and I have
only been able to recover a few of those poems . . . I feel terrible about that!
If you submitted a poem OR would still like to contribute to the project, would
you please resend your submission to me at my email address: peternotehelfer@gmail.com, so that I can be certain they are included? And
please include your name, home town & country, blog site, and email address.
Thank you very much. I would like to finish this project before December if I can.
Peter Notehelfer
From my September 25 post, I reprint the following:
“The rich and the fortunate do well to keep silent,
for no one cares to know who and what they are.
But those in need must reveal themselves
must say: I am blind . . .” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
In 1904, Rilke wrote a short series of poems simply entitled, The Voices.
I would like to offer my poet friends on WordPress an invitation to help me put together a collection of poems which we might call ‘The Voices of the Voiceless’
in the spirit of Rilke example. Look out your window. Look out your door. See someone you’ve never seen before. Look into their blindness. Listen to their silence. Let us help give the voiceless a voice.
A copy of the collected poems will be posted on`line, and a hard copy sent to all contributors. Please send any contributions to peternotehelfer@gmail.com, or send me a link if you are posting them on wordpress.com so I might read your verse. Thank you.
