On Hearing of a Death

(This is a poem I'd thought about reading at the service. What I read will be up soon. For now, I am figuring out the formatting.) 

On Hearing of a Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death 

does not deal with us. We have no reason

to show death admiration, love or hate; 

his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world's stage is still

filled with roles which we play. While we worry

that our performance may not please, 

death also performs, although to no applause. 

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage

a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight

opening through which you disappeared: green, 

evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods. 

We keep on playing, anxious, our difficult roles

declaiming, with matching gestures 

as required. But your presence so suddenly 

removed from our midst and from our play, at times 

overcomes us like a sense of that other 

reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed

and play our actual lives instead of the performance, 

forgetting altogether the applause. 

-Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Albert Ernest Flemming)