The big cities are not true; they betray
the day, the night, animals and children.
They lie with silence, they lie with noise
and with all that lets itself be used.
None of the vast events that move around you
happens there. In streets and alleys
your winds falter and churn,
and in frenzied traffic grow confused.
You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty--
make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.
Look at them standing about--
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.
-- Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours,
excerpts from Book III, The Book of Poverty and Death, pp. 13, 19
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