There people live, listless, petal-white,
and die stunned by a vision of the brute world.
And none sees the gaping grimaces
that bloom from the smile of their tender race
during nights that have no name.
They take their way, voided by a life
of serving senseless things by pure rote,
and their clothes grow limp on them,
and their beautiful hands age too soon.
That’s where death is. Not the one whose greeting
brushed by them so wondrously in childhood,—
the little death, as they called it back then;
but their own, which hangs green and tasteless—
like a fruit inside them that will never ripen.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Book of Hours