Tag: unicorn

My uncle in East Germany
points to the unicorn in the painting
and explains it is now extinct.
We correct him, say such a creature
never existed. He does not argue,
but we know he does not believe us.
He is certain power and gentleness
must have gone hand in hand
once. A prisoner of war
even after the war was over,
my uncle needs to believe in something
that could not be captured except by love,
whose single luminous horn
redeemed the murderous forest
and, dipped into foul water,
would turn it pure. This world,
this terrible world we live in,
is not the only possible one,
his eighty-year-old eyes insist,
dry wells that fill so easily now.
~Lisel Mueller “The Exhibit”

This is the animal that never was.
Not knowing that, they loved it anyway;
its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny,
right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love
the beast arose, where they had cleared the space;
and in the stable of its nothingness
it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn
but with the chance that it might come to pass.
All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn.
It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass,
then one day walked out and passed into her.
~Rainer Maria Rilke “Unicorn”

I sometimes feel the need for magical thinking to help restore goodness in the sad ways of this world. We have fouled our own nest, destroying each other and the extravagant garden we were given.

Hope for restoration feels almost mythical and the stuff of legends.

Power and gentleness do come together in the story of our redemption. We are delivered into a new world by the sacrifice of the most pure and generous Spirit.

Our dry well is filled by a love that quenches all our thirst, promising that our belief in goodness is not myth or legend, but real and true.