The first word that you ever spoke was: light.
Thus time began. For long you said no more.
Man was your second, and a frightening, word
(the sound of it still shrouds us in its night),
and then again you brooded as before.

But I am one who would not hear your third.

I often pray at night: Be but the dumb,
confined to gestures, growing quietly,
he whom the spirit moves in dreams, that he
may write on speechless brows the heavy sum
of silence, and on peaks for us to see.

Be you the shelter from the angry scorn
that violated the ineffable.
In very paradise night fell:
be you the herdsman with the horn,
that once was blown, but so they only tell.

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours