Erik’s Poems

Orison Books is pleased to announce that we will publish Toward Praise: The Late Masterpieces of Rainer Maria Rilke in a New Translation by Erik Bendix in 2022.   Erik Bendix grew up in Berkeley, California as the son of a sociologist who had escaped Nazi Berlin and an artist deeply connected to tribal culture…

She teeters and wobbles,
The natural gyroscope of her
Footsteps on earth twisted
Into a spinal corkscrew

By poisons that slow down
Phantom convulsions
To the pace of a snail
Hit by garden bait.
She doesn’t complain much,

This is the creek bed
Full of stones and dry
Sinews of the flow that led
Once lush without a sigh

To a war
Caressed with swirls of watery grace
Like a sky arch to this home
A palm of loving interface.

Rain wavelets overlap in drafts
Down a mountain bowl of air,
Sweeping sage smokes and juniper,
Washing walnut roots and lavender,
Burrowing into chalk bones of the land.

We are coming back.
Not for revenge.
Not for your sake.
Not even to prove something to God.
But because life demands it.
We do it reluctantly.
Yet we know our resistance
Will have to yield.